Ron Egatz - “Post-Eisenhower Nouishment”

© Photo by Ab Sesay

Ron Egatz is the winner of the Glimmer Train Poetry Award and the Greenburgh Poetry Award. Beneath Stars Long Extinct, a collection of poems, will be published by Red Hen Press in April 2010. A poet widely published in literary reviews and anthologies, Egatz also runs Camber Press, Inc., an independent literary press. He lives in a loft on the Hudson River while missing Paris.

In what direction would you like to see American poetry move?

Egatz: I’d like to see the continued trend of readers and listeners coming back to an art form which turned it’s back on it’s audience long before I was born. We’ll never get back to the pre-radio days, or the numbers of readers poetry enjoyed a century and a half ago, but it can’t get much worse. I firmly believe the only way to regain readers is to promote poetry humans can understand. There’s no reason lucid poetry cannot have incredibly deep emotion or music in the language—energy in it that makes you want to read it aloud to your friends and strangers in the streets. The main problem with achieving this is most Americans are completely unaware this kind of poetry even exists, and that’s not their fault. Critics became translators of the obscure, the virtually incomprehensible. They stopped judging and recommending. In turn, generations of educators got this trickle down of oblique verse. They, in turn, pushed it on students, who came to know of American poetry as annoying, at best. Publishers allowed this to happen and they killed their own audience. They did it to themselves. No one wants to pay money for a product that makes them feel stupid.

Reading a poem like “Poopie Head,” it is obvious you don’t have a limited view of what constitutes poetic vocabulary. Do you believe any particular nomenclature is off limits to poetry?

Egatz: To me, that’s a compliment. Thank you. As the poem indicates, that was sparked by a phrase I heard a small girl say. I think any verbiage is fair game in the arena of poetry. Charles Bukowski horrified many readers with his subject matter, opinions, and word-choice. Through his countless paying readers, he eventually earned a living from his poetry in our time. Not many poets can say that. Toward the end of his life even Allen Ginsberg taught in Brooklyn, if memory serves.

Fear of language breeds ignorance. Words are performatives, and people should be concerned with the thoughts behind the words, not the nomenclature. We’re talking about art, which is, by nature, subjective, and more importantly, human. There will always be ivory towers inhabited by the self-proclaimed elite of all kinds. There will always be poetry by the angry disenfranchised using certain words to shock. I fall in somewhere in the middle, and the middle is vast. I want my art to turn up the heat now and then, but not gratuitously. There should be meaning and reason behind every word, particularly in poetry.

When and how have you been shocked by a writer’s use of a particular word?

Egatz: I’m more shocked by what passes for journalism than I’ve ever been by a poem, story or novel. I’m also astounded by the way reporters dance around truth and meaning. The lack of what they write is painful.

Language is constantly mutating. What was shocking twenty years ago is now spoken by children, and it’s not given a second thought. What was considered elevated diction is now common vernacular. This is only natural. Our fiction and poetry reflect this by dating it. A poem in my new book, Beneath Stars Long Extinct, called “Baby,” has examples of dated language as a main theme.

Some writing holds up well, some sounds silly. Many people think Shakespeare is Old English. They’re off by centuries. Chaucer is Middle English, and he shocked plenty in his time. I’m pretty jaded, and subject matter is what shocks me in fiction and poetry these days, although rarely. Words themselves come and go.

What do you consider “success” in the world of poetry?

Egatz: I heard an old interview where Henry Miller said he hung on the hope there was one real reader out there for him; one person who loved what he did, and fully understood it, collected every book, et cetera. When you think about it, that’s an incredibly serious thing to ask the world to send your way and a hell of a gift if you get one.

For me, the writing itself is the thing. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years. I never had cable television; didn’t miss a thing, apparently. Reading a bad book was always better than most shows I can ever remember on the tube. When the writing wasn’t going well, it was still a great ride even though I wasn’t getting published. Whatever was happening in a notebook or with my ten fingers on the Macintosh was always more interesting to me. When you’ve got a new solid poem you can’t revise any further and you feel good about it, there’s almost nothing better—except maybe when the woman you love gives you one of those genuine smiles and she means it.

I’ve been pretty fortunate in that I’ve amassed a small group of people who really turn out when I read in New York. Doesn’t seem to matter if I’m doing my fiction or poetry. I feel fortunate I’ve got them, even though I haven’t had a book out until now. I’ve gotten fan mail based on poems that have appeared in anthologies and small journals. That’s always surprising. Because of these little shots in the arm—these little successes—I stopped submitting to the magazines that didn’t want me. I know that’s the wrong advice to give, but for me, the writing was the thing I lived for, not to see my name in lights. For the last ten years, the only publications I’ve had were anthology editors and magazine editors who solicited me. That was enough. I felt successful. Some editor out there cared enough to seek me out. The ones who wrote from Europe really made me feel honored, at least for a half-hour. Then it was back to work.

How is a poet responsible for shaping his or her virtual persona (a la a website or twitter, for example)? Is this critical to success?

Egatz: It’s hard to define the word “success” when you’re talking about contemporary American poetry. Like I said earlier, you can probably count the poets who earn a living at writing poetry on one hand. Let me clarify that by saying I’m not talking about songwriting, rap, or perhaps other kinds of performance poetry. Most poets wind up in academia to keep the roof aloft and the child support payments going. It’s been like that for a long, long time.

I know many poets older than myself who really resisted the Internet. One famous poet told me, “the promotion should be handled by the publisher and the place hosting the reading.” Well, times have changed. Perhaps it used to be like that in the forties, but that’s history. It’s nice to have your own little outpost on the Internet with all the relevant data and reading schedule, but with the average new poetry book selling 3000 copies and being deemed a real success, you have to wonder if it’s worth a poet’s time and money to build a professional-looking site or blog.

What are the origins of Camber Press? What inspired you to start your own press?

Egatz: The origins are my inability to make a living as poet or fiction writer. I taught myself to be a graphic designer and have been a freelancer for almost my entire adult life. It’s paid the bills most of the time. The art of beautifully-set typography is as brilliant to me as any other art. The frustration of buying badly-written books, or poorly-typeset books, made me want to combine good poems with what I did for a living. If you had to point to a moment of inspiration that was a good kick to my head, it was when someone gave me that collection of letters between Delmore Schwartz and James Laughlin. You can follow their struggle to get New Directions off the ground, and while reading it, I thought, “I can set type. I can design books. I can edit. I’ve got a Mac. I know a lot of poets. What the hell am I waiting for?” I procrastinated for years, but eventually I launched it.

You’ve stated the mission of Camber Press is to “publish lucid poetry that is accessible without sacrificing its inventiveness and depth of emotion.” What do you wish to publish books with these particular goals in mind?

Egatz: Well, it’s the kind of poetry that speaks to me. It’s the only hope in hell poetry has of regaining an American audience. It turns out I was right in that we’ve got a devoted following who really enjoy our editions and support the press with their dollars. Some people have sent checks with notes: “Don’t send me any books. I own them all. Keep going!” There’s still readers out there who care and respond.

It’s a labor of love, for sure. I pump every dollar back into the next book printing, web hosting, or postage. We also run an annual poetry award that’s very popular, and this year is our second fiction award. We attract very well-known judges, who seem happy to be part of what we do.

What do you believe makes a great poetry teacher?

Egatz: That’s a delicate balancing act. You want someone who can be firm and point out what’s going wrong with a poem or story, but you also want someone who’s not going to destroy too many young hopes. It’s definitely a human and diplomatic art. I had some brilliant ones when I was at Sarah Lawrence College for my MFA, but that place and its pedagogical ethos is a very rare gem. When I was there the masters of this included Kevin Pilkington, Brooks Haxton, and Thomas Lux. They pushed students in the right direction, and did everything they could to encourage.

Unfortunately, from junior high school on up, the vast majority of teachers are not good writers, and the best writers don’t seem to teach. They keep the good stuff for themselves. I’ve heard a lot of good writing professors talk about how teaching dilutes their work.

In Husbands and Wives, Woody Allen‘s character is a writing professor and he says something like, “You can’t teach writing. All you can do is expose them to good writing and hope it inspires them.” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s pretty close. I think there’s a lot of wisdom in that bit of dialog. I quoted it when working on a PhD, and it wasn’t well-received, to say the least. I didn’t finish that degree, by the way.

The rare strong students will stick it out if it’s in them deeply enough, and keep writing long after they graduate. Much of a professor’s “success rate” at turning out good writers has to do with one simple thing: how open to criticism and suggestion each student is. If a student enters a workshop or MFA program and thinks their work is set in stone, he or she is just wasting time and money. The institutional education of a young writer is a two-way street, and a lot of stars have to be aligned for things to turn out brilliantly. And then there’s the whole autodidact route, of which I’m a big fan, but it has its own considerable traps and shortcomings.

What is your favorite novel and why?

Egatz: I’m afraid I may disappoint with this, but it’s still In Search of Lost Time. Maybe it’s the only child in me—the endless interior monologue. Maybe it’s my never-ending dream of living in France. I think largely it’s the magical rhythm of the sentences. It’s Keith Richards’ rhythm before he was born across the Channel. It’s a steady rhythm, but there’s beautiful, in-time deviations in it, and it’s always building. Proust seemingly does everything in that novel, and he does it well. It breaks my heart whenever I read it. I fantasize I’ll live in France and become fluent so I can read it without translation.

What is your favorite dish to cook?

Egatz: I make a seared tuna that’s won me many friends. The secret is twofold: the quality and cut of the sushi-grade tuna is paramount, and the rest of it is the dry rub of my own creation. I’ve also had women put up with a lot to be near my popcorn. I’m talking real popcorn. No microwave nonsense, and no hot air popper.

What dead poet makes your heart stop? What living one?

Egatz: Rilke still hits them out of the park for me. Batting for the living team, it’s a guy almost no one knows. Max Garland. He won the Juniper Prize for his first book, The Postal Confessions. It stuns me, still. I’m a Garland groupie, although we haven’t met or exchanged letters. I carry The Postal Confessions in my backpack—I’m not kidding. It’s been around the world with me. I’ve given away almost twenty copies. I would simonize his car. Twice!

How do you believe having a book published will change your life?

Egatz: I’m still going to earn a living doing something else, unfortunately. This is the eighth book of poems I’ve written. I think the seventh is worthy of publication. Number seven includes a series called The Elizabeth Rogations, which is unlike anything I’ve ever written. A brilliant woman named Françoise Brodsky translated them into French, but only a few have been published in journals. The other books were my learning curve, minus assorted gems here and there. Maybe some editor will read number eight—Beneath Stars Long Extinct—and want number seven. Number nine is looking pretty good, too, although it’s not done. The most I can hope for is a wider audience, which is certain to happen, as my audience now is largely my curious following of supports who show up at New York-area readings. I’m lucky to have them. A friend of mine calls them FoEs. Friends of Egatz.

What informed the order of the poems in your upcoming book?

Egatz: This book had a few big sections excised and replaced with newer poems. It’s always a gamble putting a book together. Will someone hate the first poem? Will they read from the front when they pick it up in a store? Will they read the last poem first? Something random from the middle? It’s a crap shoot. I showed the manuscript to a well-respected elder statesman of poetry. He loved all the poems I wasn’t feeling strongly about at the time. It’s art. If we wanted easy answers, we’d work with numbers all day.

The order is a temperamental beast. Some poems just seem to naturally flow together. I lay the poems on the floor and look for a rhythm. You do the best you can and hope you have a good editor who cares.

How much influence did you have over the design of your book? What elements of book design did you feel most strongly about and why?

Egatz: I probably felt more strongly about the production and design of the book than most authors because I’m a designer by trade. I had some real concerns for Beneath Stars Long Extinct, and Mark at Red Hen Press was kind enough to listen. I like the way he designs for Red Hen, and I feel okay with it in his hands. It’s his baby now. I’m very conscious about not wanting to step on his toes, as it’s his job, and no one competent likes being told how to do their job. Kate Gale, the founder and Managing Editor, and I have the same ethos of what a cover should be like and do for a book of poems. Like I said earlier, I’ve got a lot of thoughts on typefaces. Mark knows I have a thing for the Minion family. We’ll see what happens. I’m in good hands.

What are your poetic obsessions?

Egatz: Lucid but deep poetry is my crusade. People of all poetic skill levels write poetry for a reason. They have emotion they want to get out in some concrete form. Why some people choose to write in a way others can’t understand just baffles me. That’s my main struggle: make it as rich as you can, but craft it so others can enjoy it, too.

My other obsession is the word “that.” This word makes me crazy. It can be cut more times than not from any written text or left out of speech. It’s probably the most unnecessarily used word in English. I’ve actually read news stories where a reporter will insert it with brackets into a quote someone gave them. It’s insane. We should start a campaign. I’ll run for office on it. “Eradicate that.” Oh, and I love when someone puts two of them together. “He said that that is why the peanut butter is on the ceiling.” Are you kidding me? Did I just miss you getting tapped on the back of the head with a ball-peen hammer? These are the kinds of things I worry about. That and love, of course.

Tell me about the documentary that will feature you. How does it feel to be filmed? Do you feel you are portraying your true self on camera?

Egatz: The plan is it will be a full-length documentary about the state of contemporary American poetry. There are few filmmakers involved who are endlessly scrambling for funding, and they have some great experience. Apple and camera manufacturers have democratized film making, but you still need considerable money to fly to locations and put up the crew, not to mention pay people a living wage. Because this entire effort is hanging by a thread, and although there’s footage in the proverbial can, certain individuals don’t want their name associated with it until they know funding is in place to bring it to the finish line. I don’t blame them, but I hope they stick around until it’s a reality. Together, we’ve come up with an angle and a story on this big subject no one else has. So far, it’s riveting.

Being filmed doesn’t bother me. I did some acting long ago. You just carry on with the business at hand and don’t let the camera creep into your consciousness. When I’m at the podium reading, I’m trying to be accessible, engaging, and read the hell out of the poem. I get lost in it, so there’s really not the mental bandwidth to be self-conscious. As far as portraying my true self, it’s anyone’s guess. They say the most impossible thing in the world is to see yourself.  But when you’re an only child, I think you have a leg up on self-awareness. Maybe a half of a leg.

Can you cite any other examples of art made about poetry (or involving poetry either directly or indirectly) that you admire?

Egatz: It’s a lot easier to find poetry made about art. Michael Salcman, a poet from Baltimore, put out The Color that Advances, a great little Camber Press collection of poems about paintings, for instance. Paintings with poems or poem-fragments in them have never appealed to me. At the moment, I can’t recall one that really moved me. I always look at them in a gallery or museum and wonder, “Why those words and not others?”

Films about poets or fiction writers are always a mixed bag, at best. The problem is intrinsic to the creation of the art. What does a poet or fiction writer do? They sit in a small room and suffer and struggle alone with a piece of paper. It’s not a very attractive or action-filled situation. All the digital explosions in Hollywood can’t help that screenplay. This is one of the things I love about poetry. It’s incorruptible. When was the last time corporate America hired a poet to do what they do best? Probably when Ford asked Marianne Moore to name one of their cars. Of course they rejected her submissions and named it the Edsel. This is a poem in itself. You can’t make this stuff up.

Poety is a pretty introspective art. Do you believe the prevalence of writing about writing (on the Internet, in journals, and elsewhere) contributes positively or negatively to the state of poetry today?

Egatz: The truth is the art, or, more accurately, the thing that makes us create art, lies in each individual to a different degree. There are those who get into poetry as a form of therapy—like journal writing, if you will. Many of them are served by poetry until they get through a particular crisis, and then they’re done with it, and that’s fine. Unfortunately, when they surrender and move on with their lives, they also give up the chance of refining their craft. And then their descendants wind up throwing out their poems. There’s a depressing thought.

I would never begrudge anyone for either writing a book about writing or buying one. I bought a few when I was a kid. Sometimes it’s nice just to know other bastards are out there struggling with this art just as much as you are. As far as the quality of all the writing about writing, that’s an art, too. Just like anything else, you’ve got to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Thanks, Ron!

David Baker:
Is there a poet sexier than E. E. Cummings?  At least in the pantheon of erotic love poets, Cummings stands at the front alongside Sappho, Whitman, and Dickinson, each in his or her distinctive way.  In our day, poets as different as Marilyn Hacker, Carl Phillips, and Sharon Olds learn from his rich sensual methods and rhetoric.  It’s not just the recurring erotic narrative of his poems, all those lovers and breathing bodies and entwined love songs, but it’s also Cummings’s fabulous insistence on the erotic essence of poetry itself—the music and shaping of the art—that makes him constantly sensual, such a flirt, such a convincing and true lover.

Cummings’s very forms woo us.  Sometimes his love poems are dramatic scenes (“raise the shade / will youse dearie? / rain / wouldn’t that // get yer goat”).  Sometimes they are pure songs (“my lady is an ivory garden, / who is filled with flowers”).  One poem of his (“the boys I mean are not refined”)  was deemed to be so lewd that the first publishers consented to print it only in Cummings’s handwriting, not in typescript—and of course the handwritten version is much more visceral and human, much sexier.

Sometimes his poems give us whole, highly compressed histories.  Here is all of one of them:

wild(at our first)beasts uttered human words
—our second coming made stones sing like birds—
but o the starhushed silence which our third's

In just three lines Cummings presents the story of evolution as well as the evolution of lovers’ language from speech to song to silence.

Cummings adores the sensory and physical delights of words, as he takes them apart, caresses them, exposes their syllables and their other most private parts:  a solitary letter here, a piece there, a rounded or dangling segment usually hidden immodestly in the body of the whole word or line.  We feel the music and see the painterly movement of his poems like no other poet’s work.  How delighted we are when we remember, once more, how formally true he is, even in his most rapturous disfigurations.  More than a quarter of Cummings’s poems are—if you reassemble and rebuild their ragged parts—sonnets.  And isn’t that the lyric form of lovers?  Even the little poem above, with its self-interruptions and coinages, its hesitations and hurry-ups, is crafted into ten-syllable lines with a single sure rhyme.  He is old and new at once.  He is in so careful a rush.  That’s Cummings.

David Baker, author of several volumes of poetry and criticism, is the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing at Denison University and Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review. His most recent collection is Never-Ending Birds (Listen to Baker read “Too Many” on Poems Out Loud). He lives in Granville, Ohio.

Patricia Smith:
“there is between my big legs a crisp city…”

When I read that line from /vii/, l felt a distinct and definitive ripple, a stinging buzz, a blue electricity in my nether-regions. The city that came immediately to mind? Chicago—its gilt edges and unbridled stank, back alleys and harmonica moans, train tunnels and gunshots. The only way I survived that city was to swallow it whole, to feel it’s arrogant pout threatening my ribs and heartbeat, to firm its blade edges edging their way into muscle. But once I read e.e.‘s line, I knew right away where Chicago lived, in that landscape bordered by my rambling hips. “…the streets beautifully writhe…all the houses terribly tighten/upon your coming”: I easily feel what he felt, a teeming metropolis rattled by weather—friction-fueled heat, a sudden absence of wind, a rain with a beauteous stink. “…you feel the streets of my city with children,” life where there was no life.

What can I say when I’ve said that this poem pulled me away from my chair, down a hall and into my husband’s study, there I tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Yeah, babe?,” he said in the crime-fiction writer way of his, without moving his eyes from the computer screen. I answered simply: “I’d like to hotly shove the lovingness of my belly against you.”

And just like that, it was on. But we didn’t move to the bedroom. We settled on a trip to Chicago.

Patricia Smith is a poet, teacher, performance artist, and author. She is a Cave Canem faculty member and has served as the Bruce McEver Chair in Writing at Georgia Tech University. Her fifth book of poetry, Blood Dazzler, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry. For more information, go to wordwoman.ws.

Ann Townsend:
In May of 1919, Scofield Thayer, E. E. Cummings’s dear friend and patron, writes a letter to his friend in which he narrates a recent journey to Chicago to visit the offices of the Dial.  Thayer, as it happened, served as both literary advisor and financial patron for this distinguished magazine, and had brought along a group of Cummings’s poems to show the editors. “Your sordid verses are now profaning the office-building gentility of the Dial,” he writes.  Martyn Johnson, the magazine’s editor, had admired several from this group of Cummings’s newest poems “but,” Thayer notes wryly, “as I had expected, was discretely silent as to my favorites ‘Kitty’ and ‘The Grape-Vine Lady.’”  Most devoted readers of the poet are familiar with “Kitty,” with its police-blotter-style portrait of a young prostitute.  But his readers are perhaps less familiar with the poem that Thayer nicknamed “The Grape-Vine Lady.”  “My girl’s tall with long hard eyes” is the second poem that profaned the civilized offices of the Dial; it is perhaps my favorite of Cummings’s erotic poems.

Like many of the verses in Erotic Poems, “My girl’s tall…” raised eyebrows when it was initially published in Tulips and Chimneys.  Even as late as 1938, when Cummings was preparing the manuscript for his Collected Poems, his editors hesitated at the inclusion of “My girl’s tall…”  But, as Richard Kennedy, Cummings’s biographer, tells it, “the Harcourt lawyers finally gave their opinion that none of the poems were going to invite prosecution.”  I laughed when I first read that sentence; it seems so unlikely now, in an age where very little shocks us, and where the possibility that a poem might prompt an outraged lawsuit seems remote indeed.

Yes, like many of Cumming’s poems, it’s a sonnet. Yes, it masterfully uses the sonnet form as both a template and storyboard for seduction. In the poem’s octave the lovers assess each other, and in the sestet they leap in to bed; the poem ends in a tangle of lovemaking. It’s speedy from beginning to end. But what’s really engaging, for me, is that this isn’t a poem of praise of the feminine, not exactly. Her hands are big, and strong.  She’s tall. In this seduction, she takes the lead. Carpe diem, the poet says. Lots of sonnets talk of seizing the day, but only rarely is it the woman who’s doing the seizing. Cummings praises her “long hard body filled with surprise / like a white shocking wire.” She is alive, tough, electric. And not sweet. When they “gravely go to bed,” their sex has the air of fierce desperation. After all, with her “thin legs just like a vine / that’s spent all of its life on a garden-wall, / and is going to die,” she has no time to waste. She’s passionate, she’s angry, she takes him to bed. His words tell us this, and more. The poem contains not only praise, but an equal sense of awe. This woman scares him a little, and he likes it.

Ann Townsend is the author of Dime Store Erotics and The Coronary Garden, and is the editor (with David Baker) of Radiant Lyre: Essays on Poetry.  She directs the creative writing program at Denison University, and lives and works on a small farm in Ohio, where she is currently at work on her third collection of poems. For more information, go to AnnTownsend.com.

Or rather, I’ve been trying to write love poems.

To be precise, I’ve been cursing the blank page where my love poems should be. I’m in love, damn it. Where are the poems? When I’m sad, I can write about sadness. When I took a cable car up Mount Pilatus, I could describe the view from 7,000 feet.

It’s not uncommon for a lover to ask, “why aren’t I in your poems?” Usually the poet thinks, “You don’t want that. Showing up in poems is a bad sign.” There is a truism that poems do not thrive on the agar of contentment. No, that’s not quite it; great poems do not thrive on the agar of contentment. Mediocrity flourishes in any petri dish. William Butler Yeats, in “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” diagnosed the problem. “Only an aching heart,” he said, “Conceives a changeless work of art.”

You’d think the ratio of poems about love affirmed, versus love lost, would be similar to the ratio of happy marriages to failed relationships. But look through any sampling of literary journals, and you’ll realize that genuinely joyous “love poems” are like unicorns. They’re extremely rare; they come to people seen as preternaturally faithful or naïve; and afterwards, someone points at what’s left behind and says, “Well, looks like plain old horse manure to me.”

Poets resist celebrating love in poems. Perhaps it seems boastful, or trite; the practitioner in us trumps the romantic. So what do we do instead? We complicate love. We challenge it. In Eavon Boland‘s sequence, “Quarantine,” (from Against Love Poetry) an Irish couple’s devotion is pitched against the winter of 1847: “In the morning they were both found dead. / Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. / But her feet were held against his breastbone. / The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.” In an interview with the journal Caffeine Destiny, Boland spoke of this (true) anecdote as “a dark love story, and an exemplary one…All the things I wanted to get at—the stoicism of dailyness, the failure of conventional love poetry—all came together there.”

In Louise Glück‘s “Purple Bathing Suit,” the famine is of a different sort, as the banalities of suburban life whittle away at the impulse to cherish. Looking at his wife in a swimsuit, a husband sees that “You are a small irritating purple thing / and I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth / because you are all that’s wrong with my life / and I need you and I claim you.” His love, perversely, can be acknowledged only in tandem to his frustration (and their eventual divorce). Love is one thing; happiness is another.

Sometimes, instead of challenging love, we sublimate it. In Peter Pereira‘s poem, “A Pot of Red Lentils,” the lovers engage in carrying, planting, and cooking, verbs of noble if oddly chaste service. It’s the legumes that have the fun, as “All afternoon dense kernels / surrender to the fertile / juices, their tender bellies / swelling with delight.”

Science also provides vehicles for love, as in Jason Schneiderman‘s poem “Sublimation Point,” which suggests the first meeting with a beloved shifts the speaker’s molecular structure, “straight to a new state without passing / through expected ones—as though enough / of me left at the moment you appeared that / I could never be whole without you.” The speaker is not unlike dry ice. “Apply heat,” he invites, and “I turn straight into ether.”

Poets invoke equations and recipes as traction against the slippery slope of sentimentality. But sometimes, nothing but sentiment will do. What then? Then we camouflage love poems in dense syntax or experimental forms. “Show, don’t tell,” we instruct students, but e.e. cummings is all about the bold, bald telling. That is not to say his poems are simple. “[S]omewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond / any experience,your eyes have their silence,” he swears, and “in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, / or which i cannot touch because they are too near.” Who’s the who? When’s the when? Where is the context we’re always demanding in workshop? No matter. We are too busy parsing out those claustrophobic, yet sensual commas.

A reader can spend the first half of Olena Kalytiak Davis‘s “sweet reader, flannelled and tulled,” trying to figure out what the hell is going on. “Reader unseduc’d / and unterrified, through the long-loud and the sweet-still / I creep toward you,” declares the speaker—at once seductive and terrifying, despite what she says to the contrary. “Toward you, I thistle and I climb.” We just got here; why are we leaving? Who is this Italian mistress with “her dark hair, and her moon-lit / teeth”? What is her “leopardi,” much less her “cavalcanti,” and why can we not resist them?

“Reader, I will never forgive you,” we are told, “but not, poor / cock-sure Reader, not, for what you think.”

Only in the endgame does Davis’s speaker confess “I had been secretly hoping this would turn into a love / poem.” We cling to this sentence not because of its craft (it sounds a little like an Elton John song) but because of its clarity. And this is a love poem, of course; “I have cleared this space for you, for you, for you,” she promises. But we must play along that it isn’t one, or risk humiliating the speaker by illuminating her vulnerability. Love, it seems, is a flame that cannot be caged by palm, nor lamp, nor poem—its air supply would run out. Love is wildfire or bust, and Davis’s language runs rampant to suit.

In The Last Unicorn, a book by Peter S. Beagle (later made into an animated movie), for a time the unicorn submits to being on display in Mommy Fortuna’s travelling carnival. One of Fortuna’s henchmen affixes a gaudy horn alongside the unicorn’s actual one. Humans refuse to see the real thing, she is told. Their eyes need to see a plain mare with a fake appendage, even as their hearts recognize the unicorn.

I am not arguing against these ways of writing about love; these are great poems. I am only pointing out that when we showcase love in its futility, or hide lust in a menu, or bury devotion in grammar, we are gluing a horn on the unicorn. Our jaded eyes insist that “real” love is shaded in compromise. But my blank page is waiting, and my heart reaches for an older truth. Because there is love in this world: earned, fought for, fallen into, given away. Call me conventional, or sappy, but I believe that for precious seconds at a time there is pure, happy, human love in this world.

How strange that we are so bad at capturing this in our poems—and, worse yet, so afraid to try.

Weirdly enough, when we’re talking about language, not people, hate redeems love. Hate poetry, I mean, redeems love poetry. Take those sagging lyrics from “I Love You Truly” and substitute the word hate for love.

That’s what I did for the first lines of this poem:

Voilá! New life! Like the line, “life with its sorrow, life with its tear / Fades into dreams when I feel you are near,” all clichés were once powerful, magically powerful, turns of phrase. They got at something so perfectly, they were doomed to overuse. All writers know this, because each of us has, in the fury of the moment, believed we’ve found the exact and singular expression of a heightened emotional reality (“I am a real poet,” we’re thinking), only to wake up the next day and see that what we’ve “found” is a line like “life with its sorrow, life with its tear…” Mostly, we cross that stuff out. With “Hate Poem,” I got to keep it. I got away with the literary equivalent of manslaughter: cliché. [More crimes against language.]

Photo by Steve Rhodes on Flickr.

The other operational observation for this poem is that hate demands of its bearer the same scrutinizing myopia as of the lover. Hence, the list seemed the perfect form, the more exhaustive, the better. Also, I found that the delight we take from inspecting each minute feature of the self in love and the beloved can be derived in equal measure from the self in hate and the be-hated. Therefore, the list could be a gleeful one. But all list poems present the same problem: how do you know when you’re done? You can’t go on forever, even if the list certainly can. Luckily, that final image of idealism as a pair of lungs came to me as I sat down to write. I thought it was for another poem, and so I scribbled it in the margin (“Idealism=lungs”). But as I wrote, those lungs pointed out to me that they, like lovers and haters, come in pairs. Then they relocated to the broken submarine of the body, where their idealism would be tested, and settled into the ending, a felicity for which I can take no credit, as it was a visitation, not an act of writing.

Over the years since 2005, many students have contacted me because they are reciting or writing about this poem, which gives me great hope that the era of assigning snowflake haiku is over. High school students in particular make no bones (cliché) about what they want to know: Who is the bastard? Reader, I invite you to plug in your own nominee, but be careful. If hate and love are so interchangeable in their written expression, then who’s to say they’re not interchangeable in real life? It may be that first in line for your hate poem is the one you love.

“…autobiography is an occasion to purge oneself of vanity, while advancing the project of self understanding—call it the wisdom project—which is never completed, however long the life.”

I am still hard at work on this project of the self. The solitary self, as well as the self in relation to the world and the unknown universe we swirl around in, uncertain of our purpose or future. When I wrote the poems that would become my first book, I didn’t think of it as a book, but rather as a need to understand the basic questions that all human beings ask: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? What is beauty? Why is there suffering? Where is truth? These questions would arise in me in the form of poems, and in making the poems into a collection, I tried to arrange them in a shape, find a path for them to travel to make clearer those questions. I write to know the questions.

Poem after poem, book after book, the ante is upped. I think this could be why it takes so long between books. The poet is working harder each time to go deeper, farther, layering on or stripping away to find the exact color or texture, the core or the root, the frail light or the watery dark. I write to work things out. I write to concentrate, to feel a sense of purpose rise up in me. I enjoy the struggle of making a new object to present to the world, a gift made from scratch—whole, unique, edible as bread. And I want that gift to travel well, packed into an old boat on calm water or hidden inside a greased body diving into a blue pool, a sleek arrow that leaves a feathered silence and wonder in its wake. I like moving, word by word, toward a sense of discovery, toward an awareness of self—a curious, energetic, intelligent, sacred, baffling, depthful, heartful self. I work to find my subject, something I can sink my teeth into. I live for that flaring up of language, when the words actually carry me, envelope me, grip me. And all the above is why I read poetry, to hear the truth, spoken harshly or whispered into my ear, to see more clearly the world’s beauty and sadness, to be lifted up and torn down, to be remade, by language, to become larger, swollen with life.

I write to add my voice to the sum of voices, to be part of the choir. I write to be one sequin among the shimmering others, hanging by a thread from the evening gown of the world. I write to remember. I write to forget myself, to be so completely immersed in the will of the poem that when I look up from the page I can still smell the smoke from the house burning in my brain. I write to destroy the blank page, unravel the ink, use up what I’ve been given and give it away. I write to make the trees shiver at the sliver of sun slipping down the axe blade’s silver lip. I write to hurt myself again, to dip my fingertip into the encrusted pool of the wound. I write to become someone else, that better, smarter self that lives inside my dumbstruck twin. I write to invite the voices in, to watch the angel wrestle, to feel the devil gather on its haunches and rise. I write to hear myself breathing. I write to be doing something while I wait to be called to my appointment with death. I write to be done writing. I write because writing is fun.

Editor’s Note: This short essay is from Red Thread, Gold Thread: The Poet’s Voice an anthology edited by Alan Cohen. It is a book of essays by poets on how they came to poetry and why they practice their art. Funds from the book are going toward the continuation of the annual Power of Poetry Festival held in Logan, Ohio since 2002. You can buy the book here.

A few years ago, I reviewed the children’s classic Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti, written by Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes in 1931. The Haiti presented in that book was a simple, lyrical place, in some ways almost paradisaical, and totally at odds with the terrible scenes of destruction and human suffering we are seeing in newspapers and on television broadcasts since the earthquake. Even before the earthquake, however, Haiti’s troubles in recent years, its political instability, social chaos, and poverty, made it an unlikely destination for most travelers.

This didn’t deter my husband, who began making regular trips to Haiti in 1995 to research a trilogy of historical novels (All Souls Rising, Master of the Crossroads, and The Stone That the Builder Refused) about the Haitian slave revolt of 1791. Since he is an intrepid, resourceful traveler, who recognizes little in the way of danger, I decided it would be pointless to worry about his safety until the day of one trip, when the Haitian Times landed on our doorstep in Baltimore running the bold headline “Kidnappers Run Amok.” Fortunately, his plane to Haiti had already taken off, which was a good thing, since I know that that particular story wouldn’t have stopped him from going. But my misgivings on that occasion spurred the poem “You Have Flown to the Dangerous Country.”

There are places that we know well—we’ve lived in them in our adult lives, we remember them from childhood, we visit them on pleasure trips—and there are places that we have never been (and we may never go to), which exist just as vividly, and maybe more vividly, in our imaginations. Haiti is such a place for me. But the Haiti that I imaginatively possess is not the devastated Haiti currently in the news. It is another Haiti painted by Haitian painters in the towns and villages across that country, a Haiti that my husband has brought back—in the form of many small, perfect paintings—in his well-worn, travel-stained duffel bag.

One painter in particular, Armand Fleurimond, born in 1967 in Cap Haitien, has given me a sense of Haiti that could never be gleaned from the shattering stories currently making headlines. Fleurimond paints everyday Haitian life with charm, mystery, humor, and an occasional touch of surreal whimsy.

Many of Fleurimond’s paintings depict a realm of childhood not unlike the scenes in Popo and Fifina, where girls jump rope or play hopscotch in front of delicate pastel houses trimmed in gingerbread, where boys fly kites next to a pristine sea, where street vendors sell fruit in the market, women wash clothes in the river, and skeptical couples engage in flirtation and romance. The focus in Fleurimond’s work is usually not on large historical events but on the small moments of daily life. Some painters and writers can look so closely at everyday life that they are able to convince us that the most ordinary moment is actually extraordinary. Fleurimond is one of them.

One small Fleurimond painting in particular that I have in my study, no bigger than 6 x 8, is a close-up of a ruddy-chested bird perched on a leafy green branch in the dark of night, singing or ready to sing. It has always struck me as a kind of painterly counterpart to a much-quoted Emily Dickinson poem, “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers.” In a disaster, it is the picture I would want to take with me to get me through.

Although I seldom hear from Fleurimond (I met him only once, briefly, here in the United States several years ago when he came for an artist’s residency), this past fall he e-mailed me to ask if I would send him some painting supplies, which I did. He didn’t say so, but I assumed his day-to-day situation was difficult. This was before the earthquake. He was living in Port-au-Prince, near the Presidential Palace, and since the earthquake, I have not heard from him. I hope that he has made it safely through these past few weeks. If so, what he will paint now I cannot imagine. But looking at his paintings, which I have been doing a lot of recently, has led me back to a passage in Popo and Fifina in which a wise old Haitian carver is talking about what inspires his art:

“If I walk down the beach on my way to the shop in the morning and see the tiny boats putting out to sea, that makes a picture in my mind. If I see a hungry beggar, that leaves a picture, too. Some pictures make me glad…Some make me weep inside…And when I’m glad to be living, trees and birds and leaves look one bright color to me…what I am inside makes the design…I put my sad feeling and my glad feeling into the design. It’s just like making a song.”

Photo by D Sharon Pruitt on Flickr

Elizabeth Bishop once described the writing of a poem as a “happy accident.” She knew that the image or event that triggers a poem is always unexpected. It can’t be planned or contrived, willed or wished for.

This has certainly been true for me. I remember how a long-ago trip to the town dump in Stonington, Maine—certainly not a beautiful or “poetic” place—inspired a poem of mine titled “The Woman on the Dump.” And, a few years later, how a visit to my daugher’s elementary school led to my writing “Snail.”

It was Parents’ Day. Predictably, we moved from classroom to classroom, ending up in the science lab where the fifth-grade girls, notebooks in hand, were busily gathering data and performing experiments on snails. I had never really observed a snail before, and I was struck (really and truly struck, as if by a tiny lightning bolt) by the grace, mystery, and the utter strangeness of my daughter’s snail as it traversed the long green lab table in minute increments.

Photo by Dave & Karin on Flickr.

A poem in the process of being composed, advancing in to the world snail-like, word by careful word, is always a series of small, crucial decisions. Even if a poem is written in free verse, the choice of even one wrong word can mar the overall rhythm and sound pattern. “Snail” seemed to insist on its own distinct form and shape and ended up looking very different from most of my other poems (which use conventional lineation, punctuation, and capitalization). Why this should be so, how a unique “free” form rises up spontaneously in a series of drafts, is always a mystery. One proceeds by intuition. Only later, the poet may understand and approve (or despair) of these decisions, depending on how well the poem turned out.

Looking back at “Snail,” it seems now as if the subject had demanded a different style, speed, and shape. I certainly did not articulate these things to myself as I was writing, but, in retrospect, choices do have reasons. Certainly abandoning the forcefulness of capital letters in favor of more humble lowercase seemed intuitively “right,” as did dispensing with the too definite, inarguable quality of punctuation and enjambed, or end-stopped, lines. A snail’s slow, inexorable progress, or stillness, the sense if it being engaged in being rather than doing, is something I wanted to convey. White space replaced punctuation as a way to alternate between sound and silence, movement and stasis. Ampersands contributed (maybe) to the spare, minimal quality, moving the poem along. Poets hope to create certain effects but can never know if they succeed. That’s for the reader to decide.

I should say one more thing. Sometimes another poet’s poem will shadow a poem I write. Certainly, A. R. Ammons’s poem “Still” will always be for me the parent poem of “Snail.” Ammons’s poem begins,

                    I said I will find what is lowly

                                       and put down the roots of my identity

                                       down there:
 
                              each day I'll wake up
 
                              and find the lowly nearby,

                                        a handy focus and reminder,

                                        a ready measure of my significance,

                                        the voice by which I would be heard…

Ammons’s declaration, spoken passionately at poem’s end, that “there is nothing lowly in the universe” is where, poetically speaking, I am right now. Looking for the next lowly thing, something almost, but not quite, below the radar of my attention. Waiting for the next “happy accident.”

In the schools I’d visit, I’d sometimes pick up a discarded sheet of paper from the hallway floor, something a student had written in his notebook and then torn out. Sometimes, I could tell that he’d been given an assignment, and that he’d tried to fulfill it, and by tearing it out it was clear that he felt he had somehow failed. Out of all the ephemera I’ve bent down to collect from black and green elementary school linoleum floors over the years, one has stayed with me. Likely it was part of a research paper, likely for biology. It started with a general statement, which was, I imagine, meant to be followed by supporting facts. The sentence, neatly printed on the first line, was this: All living things have shoulders—after this line there was nothing, not even a period, as if even as he was writing it he realized something was wrong, that he would never be able to support what he was only beginning to say, that no facts would ever justify it. All living things have shoulders—the first word is pure energy, the sweeping “All,” followed by the heartbeat of “living”—who wouldn’t be filled with hope having found this beginning? Then the drift begins, into uncertainty—“things”—a small misstep, not so grave that it couldn’t be righted, but it won’t be easy. Now something has to be said, some conclusion, I can almost hear the teacher, I can almost see what she has written on the blackboard—“Go from the general to the specific”—and what could be more general than “All living things,” and what could be more specific than “shoulders”? He reads it over once and knows it can never be reconciled, and so it is banished from his notebook. All living things have shoulders—this one line, I have carried it with me since, I have tried to write a poem from it over and over, and failed, over and over. I have now come to believe that it already is a poem.

All living things have shoulders. Period. The end. A poem.

Editor’s Note: Nick Flynn is currently on tour for his powerful new memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb. Tonight he’ll be reading at BookCourt in Brooklyn, NY. And next week he’ll be on the west coast in LA, San Francisco, and Portland. Check out Nick’s tour schedule on BookTour.com.

• Watch out DC, poetry is about to stop being polite and start getting real. The Real World goes to DC the same year that the Beltway Poetry Quarterly turns 10 years old!

• Readers of Fiction Writers Review are getting a special subscription rate (just $12) on Poets & Writers Magazine between now and January 15th. Act now! Operators are standing by.

• The new issue of Cerise Press is now available. Francophiles rejoice!

• Poetry and e-readers. Match made in heaven? or Neruda is spinning in his grave? Comment with your thoughts in haiku form.

Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Main Branch. Photo by JanetandPhil on Flickr.

When was the last time you went to the library? Too often, writers outside academia (myself included) fall out of the borrowing habit. We fetishize book-buying as a variation on the Golden Rule, i.e., Pay unto others as you would have them pay unto you. Whether it’s a silky French-flapped chapbook from Tupelo Press or a hardback collected Bob Hass or a hand-sewn booklet hocked after the open mic, we offer money as a gesture of both financial and symbolic support. We get the book signed, hoping the author writes something quirky and personal, determined to make our copy as irreplaceable as possible.

In contrast, libraries treat today’s books as eminently replaceable. They are vessels to be denuded of their dustcovers, Dewey-decimaled on their spines, worn out, replaced, worn out again. Yet the book lover in me, returning to the library for the first time in many years, still feels at home. Fields of brown, nubby carpet, the sweet must of accumulated paper, all lit by a fluorescent sun. Why has it been so long?

Fifty: the magic number. Fifty: one stack under each arm, one stack in each hand, and one stack teetering on the tray of my extended forearms, edged carefully onto the checkout counter. Fifty: the maximum quantity of books that could be checked out from the Tysons-Pimmit Regional Library circa 1990.

Every writer begins as a reader, and every reader benefits from the code of readership learned in public libraries. These lessons are found not on the page—or in the page’s electronic equivalent—but in the experience of sharing shelves in a public space.

For starters: where else do you learn to pick a title using the rule of thumb?

I mean actual thumbs, the thumbs of readers who came before you. In libraries we recognize the judgment of touch; the best books are usually in the shabbiest shape. Every dog-eared corner marks a moment worth returning to. Every splotch of soy sauce is a medal of honor. Every creased binding proves hours spent using one hand to Xerox, or iron, or whatever the day required, while clutching in the other hand a story that could not be put down. When I first began browsing my way through the science fiction stacks, I didn’t choose books that looked like pristine runway models. I chose the grizzled field veterans. That’s how I came to Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Arthur C. Clarke.

Would I have found them at Borders? I don’t think so. In stores you stand before a sea of untouched editions. You drift toward volumes with striking designs, perfect trim sizes, showy end-of-aisle displays; that’s the tidal pull of good marketing. There’s nothing to judge by but cover after cover. I once picked up Fahrenheit 451 in a store, only to put it down again. The book was too small and tightly bound, the ink too fresh and smelly. The plot looked interesting, but lots of plots look interesting. The copy lacked the magnetism of a library’s dozen broken-in paperbacks, each loved into near oblivion.

What if I’d bought it anyway? Well, a confession: Fahrenheit 451 might have become just one more in my pile of unread books. This brings me to my second point. You know the books I’m talking about: the critical darling that tops so many end-of-year lists you have to buy it; the coffee-table book that’s as much sculpture as script; the beach read that you never quite choose over shut-eye on the sand; the Amazon.com impulse buy that pushes your bill just high enough to earn free shipping on the Cuisinart.

Consider this my equivalent of a field-to-table eating philosophy: I believe selecting a book should flow, seamlessly, into reading it. Once you sever the act of acquisition from the act of consumption, you’ve ruined the integrity of the product. A book that goes unread is a corpse of paper. Authors, of all people, should know better. Yet we’re often the worst perpetrators of bibliocide.

Library users observe the natural order. The system’s defining characteristic, the due date, is as compelling as it is simple. Purchasing a book feels like an end; checking one out is a beginning, a firing of the starter pistol from which we race to finish in the time allotted. I remember days when I didn’t even make it out the front doors of Tysons-Pimmit Regional before curling up in a beanbag chair, in the kids’ nook between the windows and the guinea pig cage, and turning to page one.

I miss reading with that kind of urgency. I miss taking responsibility for the decision to not read a book, rather than slip-sliding into the excuse of “one of these days,” days that soon add up to months. There’s a reason why people return overdue library books decades after the fact. The consequence lingers. The decision should matter.

In walking away from the checkout counter with a book, we have one more unique lesson waiting for us. For many, this proves to be our first engagement with civic duty. A library card is a social pact; something of value, placed in your hands based on no more than a legal address and a baseline of trust.

A book is not a Wikipedia article that can be sampled without impact. Books on loan are organic bodies, vulnerable, that must be kept safe in return for the privilege of access. If you prick it, does it not bleed? If you drop it in the tub, does it not swell? If you leave it at the bus stop, is it not gone for good? As a matter of survival instinct, every child grows up with an inherent sense of Yours versus Mine. Not every child develops a sense of Ours. For many, public libraries are what makes the difference.

When The TypewriterGirls asked me not only to read but to speak in support of the Carnegie Library system, my first worry was that I’d have nothing to say. My second worry was that I wouldn’t shut up in time for a couple of poems. My best testimony was not verbal but physical. On stage, I opened my wallet and there—under the insurance cards, under the Exxon card, years after I’d changed my legal residence to DC—was my tattered, emerald-green Fairfax County Public Library card. Still.

“It’s simpler to call myself a poet of Washington,” I told the audience. “And true, in some ways. But I will always be a northern Virginia girl. Because the place that claims your allegiance, the place you call your hometown, is where your dreams took root. Where someone said, You can do this. We can give you the tools to do this. And for me, that was in the stacks of the Tysons-Pimmit Regional Library.”

I come to praise. I also come to rally. It’s too easy to marginalize, in this digital and penny-pinched age, the crucial skills cultivated by libraries. They are not antiquated constructs; they are vital resources. Card-carrying readers of the world, unite. Card-carrying writers of the world, unite. Our public libraries need us—and we still need them.

Thanks, Andy!

• National Book Award finalist Thomas Lynch is about to publish a new collection of stories in February 2010 called Apparition and Late Fictions. Poems Out Loud asked him to revisit his only book of poetry published ten years ago. Listen to Thomas Lynch read “No Prisoners” from Still Life in Milford.

• Nick Laird‘s most recent novel, Glover’s Mistake featured a culture blogger as the protagonist. Now this blog features Nick Laird. What goes around, comes around. Listen to Nick Laird read “Light Pollution” from On Purpose.

• Martín Espada has been called “the Pablo Neruda of North America”. He was kind enough to read a poem that guest stars Neruda from his most recent collection which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Listen to Martín Espada read “The Soldiers in the Garden” from The Republic of Poetry.

• A first listen to one of the new poems from Sherod Santos’ forthcoming collection. Listen to Sherod Santos read “Variation on a Theme (I)” from The Intricated Soul: New and Selected available in March 2010.

• This week we liked “On Translation” by Mónica de la Torre. Listen!

• Sandra Beasley picks the Best Poetry Books of 2009 for the No Tells blog. Check out all of No Tells guest Best of ‘09 lists.

• Do you Swindle?

• The election of Oxford University’s Professor of Poetry post will now involve online voting. Do you think that’s a good idea? Take our online poll.

First, an animated video for a poem by Todd Boss called “How Smokes the Smolder” from his debut collection Yellowrocket:

Then, a second video, for a poem called “The God of our Farm Had Blades”:

I asked Todd to give me some background on these videos. Here is what he told me:

Just over a year ago, a woman stopped me after one of my readings in Saint Paul and asked me if I would ever consider collaborating with an animator. She was one herself. Her name was Angella Kassube. Soon she’d cut her teeth on a few poems of mine, and I was hooked. A few months later, we formed an initiative we called Motionpoems, and to date we’ve roped over 30 other media artists into the animation of over a dozen poems by such writers as Marvin Bell, Robert Bly, Jane Hirshfield, Major Jackson, and others.

Over 150 people attended a recent screening of these at Open Book in Minneapolis recently. Queued for animation now are poets such as Robert Wrigley, Thomas Lux, Alicia Ostriker, and Beth Ann Fennlly. Projects are online at MotionPoems.com and YouTube, and are finding their way to web publications, television broadcasts, film festivals…even art galleries and museums!

I agree that poetry is an intimate written medium that depends upon the reader’s imagination in solitude. But I also feel that poetry’s aural and imagistic aspects recommend it to the medium of film in ways that can make poems newly accessible to a media-savvy generation.

What do you think? Does animated video enhance the power of a poem? Or limit it? Is it just a promotional gimmick or a new medium? Let me know in the comments and share a link to a favorite animated video poem while you’re at it.

“Letter from a Young Poet” is an ongoing series from Poems Out Loud which aims to chronicle the experiences and insights of young poets as they find out what it means to call oneself a writer: from contests and rejections, to themes and obsessions, to what bids each of them to write. Now we bring you the third installment of the series featuring Cynthia Cruz, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and the Julliard School.

As a way to start off the interview, listen to the recording above of Cynthia reading “Nebenwelt”, a new poem featured in the November/December 2009 issue of Boston Review.

Cynthia Cruz‘s work has been published or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and the Boston Review. Her first book, Ruin, was published in 2006 by Alice James Books. Her second collection will be published by Four Way Books in 2012. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the Juilliard School.

What is your day job?

Cruz: I teach at Sarah Lawrence College and the Julliard School.

What is your ideal job?

Cruz: My ideal existence would be, and this is what I am always aiming for, to, like Joseph Beuys, live art. Or, more specifically, live poetry. Not being caught in the vicious cycle of working to pay rent and trying to squeeze in moments to read and write.

Who do you read?

Cruz: I am always looking for work that hits all the poetry levers: language, music, imagery, concept, and spirit. The poems I am drawn to are these mean, tiny machines. The poem I am currently in love with does just this. It is the Scottish poet Robin Robertson’s poem “Lithium.” The poets I turn to include Lucie Brock Broido, Shakespeare, Denis Johnson, Liam Rector, Thomas James, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, T. S. Eliot, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Only recently have I discovered the fabulous work of Frederick Seidel. I want a poem to be a gorgeous ticking time bomb. Other writers I go back to again and again, non-poets, are Joan Didion and Helene Cixous.

How did you come to write poetry?

Cruz: I came to poetry late. The first poetry I came across were the albums my parents played in our homes when I was growing up: Janis Ian, Jim Croce, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithful, Jose Feliciano, Johnny Cash, and Willie Nelson. It was all terribly sad music and I cherished it. Everywhere we went, there was music: there was a record player in the playroom and we had an eight-track in the family van. One Christmas we all climbed into the van and my father drove us (from Aptos, California) down to Guaymas, Mexico. I will never forget looking out the windows at the desert, the wild horses racing in the white landscape, the huts with people living in them, and, all the way, music playing in the background. This was my introduction to poetry: the beautiful and the terrible with music as the elixir.

The first actual poetry I came across was Shakespeare (his plays) in AP English in high school and then, again, in college when I was in my twenties. The first actual poems I recall reading were by Adrienne Rich in my last year of college. I wrote poems before I read them: angry, desperate poems. I didn’t know anything about form, didn’t know what a metaphor was, nothing. I didn’t take a poetry workshop until my final year at Mills College. I took one graduate-level class with Chana Bloch and didn’t take another class until I was enrolled in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College years later. I’m relatively new to poetry. I meet other poets who tell me they’ve been writing poems since they were eight years old, and here I didn’t write my first proper poem until I was twenty-five. I’m just a baby.

How often do you write?

Cruz: I write every day, though not always formally. On the days I don’t teach I try to save my errands, schoolwork, and important phone calls for the afternoon so I can write all morning. On the days I teach, I carry whatever new poem I am working on with me, and work on it obsessively when I can: on the train and subway, in between meeting with students, while walking down the street.

What do you sacrifice in order to write?

Cruz: Well, we sacrifice everything for writing, don’t we?

To begin with, I don’t have children. The other things I do in my life—marathon running, for example, or my volunteer and advocacy work—none of these things receive anywhere near the amount of attention that writing does. Writing is my first love. Everything else must come after. I am fortunate because I am married to an artist (the painter Steven Page), so we share this unspoken understanding: there was never any pretense that we would be trying for a house in the suburbs with a garden, a family with children, a garage with two cars, that sort of thing.

How did having your first book published change things?

Cruz: When Ruin was picked up, I felt validated. Though most of the poems in the collection had been published in journals or anthologies, I still felt sheepish when, for example, family members asked what I did for a living and I answered, “I’m a writer”; I couldn’t then give them concrete evidence. Also, having my first book published did, in a way, open, for me, the doors into a larger family, this lineage of writers. Coming from a working-class background, this was important to me. I had, in a sense, to prove to myself that in fact I could do this thing, writing, that I hadn’t been delusional in thinking I could be a writer (as opposed to a more realistic career). It was deeply gratifying for me.

How do you feel reading your book now?

Cruz: Surprised. Each time I read Ruin it is as if I am experiencing the poems for the first time. Though time has passed and what I am working on now is different, ultimately my writing has not changed that dramatically. I am obsessed with the same themes and ideas, am still trying to make musical-language machines out of beauty and pain.

What is the best advice you’ve received?

Cruz: The best advice I received was from the wonderful Reginald Shepherd. One time when I was feeling sorry for myself for receiving yet another journal rejection, he told me that for every two hundred submissions, I could expect one acceptance. Where he came up with this, I don’t know, but at the time I didn’t doubt him. And since it never took me that many submissions for an acceptance, I felt 1) enormous relief and 2) absolute validation.

Reginald was an amazing writer and thinker, and yet, I think, more than anything, his mentorship to myself and other young struggling poets is what sets him apart. Anytime, and I do mean anytime, I began to despair, he always shared a personal story with me that made me feel that I was not alone. I would tell him that I could not find a job, could not get my work published, had no time to write, wanted to quit writing, become a social worker or a lawyer, was tired of adjuncting at three colleges or tired of selling clothes (which I did for two years), and he always reminded me where I came from and that I could not quit, that it was quit simply not an option. He reminded me that, despite my circumstances, I had an obligation to continue fighting. In other words, I wasn’t writing for myself, I was writing for everyone else who was lost, all the others who felt alone. I was, in fact, my obligation to write.

He would tell me all this and then, in closing, as an aside, when I asked, tell me he was okay, getting by, when in fact he was undergoing chemo or recovering from yet another horrendous surgery. He was always suffering and never said a word about it, and all the while he was writing, putting together his amazing anthologies, writing his essays. He was a saint.

Do you feel there is a community of writers where you live? Do you participate in it?

Cruz: I do think there are communities of writers where I live (both in Brooklyn and in Manhattan). I am not a part of any of these groups.

What’s the best poetry reading you’ve been to and why?

Cruz: The best poetry reading I have been to was the recent Kenyon Review Celebration with David Baker at the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn. What was so wonderful about it, aside from David’s amazing work, was the actual space. It was a truly intimate setting: all of us sitting amid the aisles of bookshelves of children’s books and novels, near the immense aquarium with the large lizard in it. It was like sitting in the living room with your family before the fireplace.

What are your feelings on the state of poetry today?

Cruz: I think we may be stuck. I think we are living under the immense shadow of modernism and postmodernism and, as a result, feel we have to create the new big thing. Sometimes it seems our need to be “new” trumps our need to be good. The term “avant-garde” has lost its meaning. How would one knkow if she or he is “avant-garde”? When I think of Stein or Eliot, what they were doing with concept and language—they were, of course avant-garde. But if they were alive now, I somehow doubt they would be doing the same things now, with words and language, that they did then.

Personally, I don’t worry about this stuff. I have to write; it is a compulsion for me to take the mess of the world, cram its symbols and imagery on a page, and then obsessively try to make sense of it. When I am revising, I try to make my poems work, as I said earlier, on all levels. This doesn’t always happen, but I do try. And this is what I do. Alone at my kitchen table in my tiny apartment in Greenpoint. I can’t worry about who will like my work and who won’t like it. Actually, that isn’t any of my business. My job is to make the things and then let them go. I can just hope someone on the other end gets something out of what I am making.

Filmed at the Stain of Poetry reading series in Brooklyn, NY on January 30, 2009.

Poems by Cynthia Cruz:
Cinderella
What God Gave or, Instructions on How to Live A Nomadic Life

• Old news now but the Winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Poetry is Keith Waldrop.

• No more excuses, People. The Walt Whitman Award deadline has been extended to December 1. Submit! Submit!

• The Details Celebrity Poetry Quiz. Can’t wait to find out who wrote #6.

• Did your MFA program make the Poets & Writers Top 50 List? Sandra Beasley’s didn’t.

In 2007, The New Yorker published the title poem from Never-Ending Birds.

Page from Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Image by infinitooples on Flickr

Several years later I sat reading in a dormer room across the country in San Francisco and was dumbstruck by something that was called poetry—a fragment of Plath, I tell everyone, but I can’t remember what poem it was and I’m not even positive it was Plath, only that some internal tectonic shift made me know I needed this thing, needed the way it changed my experience of life—how it made a space for that experience and enlarged it, too.

That book, whatever it was, has since been lost. Soon after reading it, I would lose my father. The city I grew up in would disappear, every downtown building for several blocks razed and replaced. My mother would sell the house my brothers and I grew up in, and grow old, and I would understand something about this process but still not really understand, and I would struggle to feel the deep joy in the mystery of change and not simply the terror and loss, and poetry would help me with this. I would discover other poets, and find my way to writing some poems of my own.

And once on a visit east I must have found that leather-bound book and brought it back to California, because it sits now on my shelf with the hundreds of other volumes of poetry. On top of the bookcase are photographs of my daughter and my mother. There is a framed broadside of one of my poems, a poem about desire and a red dress, writter after I had tasted the wine, had found and lost the beloved, was struggling still to understand.

The Sufi poet Rumi wrote, In truth, everyone is a shadow of the Beloved.
And Thou beside me, my father read, Singing in the wilderness.

Editor’s Note: This short essay is from Red Thread, Gold Thread: The Poet’s Voice an anthology edited by Alan Cohen. It is a book of essays by poets on how they came to poetry and why they practice their art. Funds from the book are going toward the continuation of the annual Power of Poetry Festival held in Logan, Ohio since 2002. You can buy the book here.

Handbook? There’s a handbook? Little did I know that The Creative Writing MFA Handbook: A Guide for Prospective Students is already in its second edition.

Now the latest issue of Poets & Writers ranks “The Top 50 MFA Programs,” based on poet Seth Abramson’s blog-based surveys and research. No matter how you feel about these rankings (some question their validity, most notably the Association of Writers and Writing Programs), their influence will spread like kudzu. Everyone loves a list.

Except those that didn’t make the list. Combing through Abramson’s article, I discovered my graduate alma mater has been banished to the online hinterlands of “the additional eighty-eight full-residency MFA programs.” On the P&W Web site, American University is tied with Bowling Green State University and the University of California, Davis, for the #53 spot. Which could also be called the #51 spot, but who’s counting?

Returning to the print magazine for comfort, I instead found “Get the Most Out of Your MFA Experience: Tips for Success,” which indexes helpful hints and red flags for your graduate years. Proper strategy extends far beyond picking a program. As I read onward, my suspicions congealing into unease, my unease cresting into nausea, a nausea that threatened to flood my being, I realized I’d have to come here, and confess before you—you, dear reader—all of you, the holy spirit, and William Warder Norton himself:

I did it wrong.

How could I not have noticed driving against traffic on the one-way street of po-biz? Why did fellow poets not honk and wave their arms at me? Friend, when you took a sip from my flask at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, why did you not warn Ah, this tastes like single-malt fraudulence?

Clearly I did not make the best use of my MFA years. It’s too late now; I’m doomed to copyediting cat food advertisements. But before succumbing, let me share my mistakes—as clarified by the lessons of those far wiser—in hopes you find a more perfect path to becoming an MFA-accredited writer.

Lesson #1 — Don’t settle for anything less than full funding.

Make them pay for your classes, your apartment, and the many orders of kung pao chicken you spill on your Collected Auden while sprawled out on dingy carpet. Full funding (tuition waiver, plus stipend for living expenses) is a make-or-break factor for many, and in Abramson’s schematic financial aid is listed following only quality of experience by genre.

Did I choose a fully funded program? Nope. I chose one that required cobbling together a full-time job, fellowship pay for editing our literary journal, and over $20,000 of loans.

The problem was one of vision. Looking at those fully funded programs—which almost always entail pedagogical training, apprenticeship through Writing Center tutoring, and significant teaching loads for all fellowship students—what I saw was not free ride. What I saw was no time for a job beyond campus. No chance to see what else, other than teaching, could be paired with writing as a meaningful vocation.

So I went to American University by night, and to a 9-to-5 nonprofit office job by day. Sure, I got exposure to publishing, that “other” flipside industry of writing, which scares the heck out of so many MFA graduates. Sure, I could pay for my own kung pao (though maybe not the brown rice—that cost a buck extra).

But I broke a cardinal rule of the poetry world: how dare you place value on something you can’t get for free?

Lesson #2 — Spend as much time as possible writing.

Be selfish. Date long-distance, short-term, or not at all. Write three hours a day, six days a week. No e-mail, no Facebook, and no phone calls.

Thank goodness those instructions don’t include “No reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” since that’s how I spent most of my precious could-be-writing hours from the years 2002 through 2004. That’s what happens when your living room is your bedroom, and your futon faces your television. Other foolish mortal habits included drinking with bartenders, meandering calls to a best friend who lived two hours away, open mic nights at Staccato, visiting my family, getting lost in DC’s museums, and sharing Old Bay French fries at Babe’s Billiards every Wednesday after workshop.

If I had followed the proper model, I’d have developed the discipline for a lifetime of writing. As it is, I have developed the discipline for a lifetime of Buffy, bartenders, Old Bay, and billiards, with a little writing on the side.

Without all that untidy clutter of significant others, insignificant others, and/or one-hour battles between good and evil, I’m curious—what is it these people are writing about?

Lesson #3 — Focus on your thesis.

Squeeze that coal until it makes a diamond. Give your advisor as many drafts as possible. Pore over each line of feedback with your highlighter. Because this is your First Book—

(Unless you’re like me, and your first book ditches all but eight thesis poems.)

This is the debut of Your Voice upon a waiting readership’s ears—

(Unless Your Voice is still changing, all those perfectly executed tricks in iamb and rhyme no more than the gloriously artificial falsetto notes of a eleven-year-old choirboy.)

You’ll circulate this manuscript for years, keeping the faith no matter how many reading fees, how many title changes, how many other poems wait to be written by you, until the day it is accepted for publication—

(Unless, like weak-willed me, you decide to become a writer. Not a castrato.)

Lesson #4 — Use rankings to help with critical life decisions.

This is the closest I got to doing things right. I tracked down the U.S. News & World Report that surveyed creative writing programs. When I got into American University’s MFA program and found it listed, I could trust my decision. Thank you, USNWR editors.

That is a lie. Here’s what’s funny: as I was typing it out, I thought, What was AU’s rank, exactly? #18? Maybe #16?

I just dug it up again. #50. Rockin’ #50 out of 50.

What actually happened was that in the spring of 2002, fresh from reading applications, a well-known poet and American University professor walked into a gathering of University of Virginia MFA students plus a few undergrad hangers-on, of which I was one. Without pause or general introduction, he looked straight at me and said, “You know, that knife-throwing poem of yours was really something.”

If a poet asks you to study with him, you go. When you visit campus and the first professor you meet says, “Oh! I was just reading your poems,” you go. No matter the funding. No matter the rank. You just go.

Because when you feel utterly without talent, ready to quit—and you will, trust me, more than once—you will never forget the first time you hollered words into the great void of self-addressed stamped envelopes, and someone spoke up. Someone answered, “Yes, I hear you. I’d like to hear more.”

Lesson #5 — This is a critical life decision. Critical! Life! Decision!

The decisions you make regarding your MFA—how, where, and with whom you spend your time—are of (apparent) earth-shattering impact on your (potential) future as a (theoretical) writer. Don’t panic. (Much.) You just need to be the kind of person who approaches this with discipline, reason, and openness to the guidance available.

Understand, I am not that kind of person.

Given to the language of intoxication, as so many writers are, I think of the writer as a wine bottle. The label is your career—magazine credits, books, prizes—the place where you brag and brand. The liquid is your sloshy, messy, creative self.

An MFA program is just the funnel. It’s a transport of bulk resources, pre-vintage, readying you for future pours. For some the funnel is an expensive tool, monogrammed, sides pitched for maximum efficiency. For some the funnel has as many kinks in its tubing as a beer bong. Either way, the funnel is just a preparatory stage; if it makes it on the label at all, it is in the fine print of “Distributed by…”

Your degree does not describe who you are as a writer. If it does, that’s not a good thing. So why all this hoopla and indexing? Why do people keep gilding the funnel?

I know, I know. I am mixing metaphors. I told you—they’re on to me, my heresy, my rankled and unrankable self. I’m running out of time.

Be careful. Don’t make my mistakes. Don’t follow your heart, or your whim, or the siren call of your hometown, or the promise of a mentorship. Not if it means the bottom bracket. Don’t go where you have the hard work of making your own community, shaping it twig-on-twig into a nest that sustains you. Don’t steal writing time by the minute when it could be vacuum-sealed by the hour. Don’t blow off your draft at 2 a.m. because you’re busy singing Pogues lyrics in a bar long past closed.

Don’t, whatever you do, run the risk of failure. This is why we have rankings and how-tos, right? To buffer. To plan.

Otherwise, just imagine what could happen.

You could end up…here.

Editor’s Note: Sandra’s prize-winning second collection of poems, I Was the Jukebox, will be published by W. W. Norton in April 2010. Read her blog, Chicks Dig Poetry.

• Nick Laird on a Poetry Marathon in London’s Hyde Park (Anyone know of any poet’s running in the New York City Marathon this weekend?)

• Need a last minute Halloween costume? The Academy of American Poets has you covered.

• Happy Birthday, Guernica! Five years and counting.

• Did you know Fall is the season for Poetry? Annie Finch explains.

“So that you don’t get shot by hunters,” was the friendly instruction. “Or run down by truckers.”

I am one of this month’s residents—two writers, four visual artists, coincidentally all women—in a surprisingly lush complex twenty miles outside Sheridan, Wyoming. I say “surprisingly” because accommodations vary at colonies and conferences; having gone to a half-dozen in as many years, I take nothing for granted. I’ve lolled under a down comforter in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s barn, and choked down microwaved cod in rural Virginia. At Vermont Studio Center I’d spend an hour in a gleaming-redwood yoga studio, followed by an hour scrubbing broiler pans.

At Jentel, our household is a mellow lot. Evenings end in Scrabble, tea, perhaps a movie (colonies are the last known refuge of VHS). Free of the communal dining required by some places, we eat separately, happy to honor idiosyncratic hungers. The refrigerator holds six varieties of hummus.

Whenever I announce a colony stint for two weeks or a month, my friends nod supportively. “Oh,” they say, “that should be a wonderful vacation!” In a way, yes. My time is my own. Dinner was bread and pepper relish at 11:40 p.m., with no one objecting, nor will anyone tease if I’m in a robe at 11 a.m.

In a way, no. Jentel is four hours from Yellowstone; I should rent a car and go. But as we close in on our last week, Old Faithful can’t compete with my studio. Not only will I sacrifice sightseeing for writing, I’ll sacrifice sightseeing for the 1/100th possibility of writing. With two books coming out, I’m lucky enough to make writing my job for a while. It’s still a job.

Yet I couldn’t bear to be where the buffalo roam without enjoying the dry sun that makes nine months of Wyoming winter worthwhile. So I walk. Every day. Wearing a day-glow vest and the first tennis shoes I’ve bought in nine years. (I’m a city girl, having made even grocery runs in stilettos.) I walk two miles to where the country road meets highway, then I turn around and walk back.

I feel like I should claim that each walk strikes something off my cosmic to-do list: That I always return with a new poem, or that I’ve lost five pounds, or that listening to Steven Tyler for an hour changed my whole take on Aerosmith, or that I carry a camera. I don’t. I have nothing to prove that antelope shimmy under fences, while deer leap over, or that a snapping turtle with a six-inch Stegosaurus tail polices the cow pond.

The truth is, thoughts flow and eddy on these walks in a way that doesn’t sustain formal creation or observation. I’m grateful to think of life back in DC with genuine longing. I’m grateful for doggerel verses that surface even if they’ll never make it onto a page. I’m grateful to chart the map of my next six months, the first time in my adult life I’ll be out of a desk job. I’m grateful to accept my sweet tooth and my moral failing and resolve to buy my own damn raspberry fig bars in Sheridan, because I keep stealing them from someone’s stash in Jentel’s pantry.

Why come to a colony? Like many poets, I follow the debates: Can MFA programs teach writing? Should you be laying brick instead of adjuncting? Is Flarf a worthy discipline? Should I be Twittering this essay in 47 installments?

How afraid we are of losing time! As if we can’t afford to write poems that won’t endure. As if the road can’t include both blackboard-jockeying and troweling cement. As if a few years spent on workshops, post-workshop pubbing, and rubbing elbows with professors you pray might blurb you—and I, too, went into debt for my MFA—wouldn’t have been spent in some other way equal parts tectonic and navel-gazing. Backpacking in Europe. The fixer-upper house. A rock band. An MBA.

I come to colonies because honoring yourself as an artist means accepting and indulging it all: Eureka moments, blisters, elegant shawls, and orange vests. Once I went to a colony and wrote thirty poems in thirty days, the bulk of my first book. Once I went to a colony, fell for a boy, read, and toasted marshmallows. Here I’m writing not what I meant to write, but writing.

The road is long. I walk because I love the walk, even when it takes me nowhere in particular.

Editor’s Note: Sandra’s prize-winning second collection of poems, I Was the Jukebox, will be published by W. W. Norton in April 2010. Read her blog, Chicks Dig Poetry.

Understated, in that in the film it runs just below the surface of the growing love between these two young people, is the fact of Keats’s poetry itself, an issue difficult enough to deal with in biography let alone a movie. Indeed, Keats’s relationship with Fanny releases his best and now immortal work, ranging from “The Eve of St Agnes,” “Lamia,” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci” to the magnificent Odes and “The Fall of Hyperion,” and including any number of beautiful sonnets, among them “Bright Star.” Fanny becomes not only an inspiration but, for Keats, the signature of life itself, since, from the first realization of their feelings for each other, Keats knows he is not well. Love, the poems, and Keats’s poorly diagnosed yet terminal illness all move in parallel, though in Campion’s film it is love—made brighter by the intensity of mortality—that defines her subject. But even passion here is understated, as it must have been in real life—given the conventions—for these two intense individuals. The much-reviewed scene in which the would-be lovers, in a bedroom, are speaking back and forth lines from Keats’s newly composed ballad “La Belle Dame…” surely qualifies as flesh-made-word love-making. The scene gorgeously represents what poetry as well as love are about—the spiritual inseparable from the carnal.

At the time, Keats’s positive reputation as a poet was limited to his friends, while his standing with his critics was less than zero. After his death in Rome, in 1821, at age twenty-five, the popular opinion was that he had been killed by his critics, “snuffed out by an article,” as Byron puts it. Or, as the words on his famous gravestone put it: “This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a Young English Poet who on his Death Bed in the Bitterness of His Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone ‘HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER.’ ” To Shelley, in his pastoral elegy “Adonais,” Keats had become “Like a pale flower by some maiden cherished,” a flower unable to withstand, because of his physical and psychological condition, the cold harsh winds of criticism. None of these indelible romantic clichés, of course, is true.

John Keats’s Tombstone, Rome, Italy. Photo by Widening Gyre 94 on Flickr

What killed Keats was tuberculosis and the state of the medical attention he was heir to. Nevertheless, Fanny, the cherishing “sad maiden,” some while after his death and still keenly aware of the pain of Keats’s last days in England, thought it kinder “to let him rest for ever in the obscurity to which unhappy circumstances have condemned him.” And it looked for a while that Keats’s own summation of the non-future of his name—“writ in water”—would be realized. Campion’s film, by the nature of the story it is telling, has little interest in or purchase on the question of Keats’s posthumous reputation. His potential immortality serves only as a framing context for the smaller immediate drama. Campion’s focus is the heart and feel of this true and tragic love story.

One of the most poignant moments in the film occurs when Keats places his very mortal hand against his bedroom wall, knowing that Fanny, on the other side of the separation, is placing her hand, like a rhyme, against his. So much of the power of the Keats-Brawne love story finds its source in the near-yet-far fact that they are direct neighbors, sharing what is now ironically known as the Keats House. In 1818-19, it was a double-house owned by Charles Dilke and Charles Brown, both friends of Keats. When the two men built the house it was one of the first full-time residences in the London suburb of Hampstead, which up until the early nineteenth century tended to be scattered small farms or summer property. Dilke has moved back to London to be near his son in school and has rented his half to the widow Mrs. Brawne and her three children, the oldest of whom, at eighteen, is Fanny. Keats has moved in with Brown on the verso side of the house following the December death of his brother Tom. Everything flows from the accident of this intimate yet limiting domestic arrangement.

In profound ways, Charles Brown, Keats’s closest friend, sometime collaborator, and on-going benefactor, is not only the complicating third in the love story, he is its dark energy. Brown and Fanny—also neighbors—have a sexually charged and antagonistic relationship. When it comes to Keats, Fanny thinks Brown is a possessive, controlling presence; Brown thinks Fanny an undereducated fashion flirt. The careful pacing of the film means to delineate the weight (and counterweight) of each of the characters in this triangle while establishing their dependence on one another. Poetry is only one of the arts practiced in the film; sewing, the making of clothes—which is Fanny’s forte—is the other. Campion chooses not to mention that Fanny is a relative of Beau Brummell, the Regency fashion leader; nor does she allude to Keats’s extensive medical training. Both of these backstories necessarily disappear from the focus. Brown’s heavy Scot self, however, as things develop, does not disappear but emerges to dominate the film—and the Keats story generally—as the flawed, haunted figure. The scene in which he admits to Fanny his betrayal of Keats by not traveling to Rome with and caring for his friend in his last hours is easily as riveting as the scene of Fanny’s final breakdown at the news of Keats’s death. As in classical tragedy, someone must be the bearer of the bad news and Brown becomes the messenger: his later admission of his failure regarding Keats becomes his recognition scene.

Keats, above all his contemporaries, is our contemporary. He has become and continues to be the most compelling of the Romantics. His short life, as moving a story as it is, might well have become the pulp of sentimental myth. He himself rescues his story: his “Letters” are perhaps the most interesting and beautiful ever written, while a strong selection of his poems makes him into one of the greatest of poets, whose elevation of the lyric form into tragic and sublime status has had lasting influence. Campion’s film of and from Keats is Fanny’s Keats. Fanny’s intelligence and passion guide us at every turn. We see what she sees, know what she knows, feel what she feels. Brown, at the end, accepts that she alone is the one he must confess to.

A scene from Bright Star.

Editor’s Note: Stanley Plumly is the author of Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography. It will be available in paperback on November 9, 2009.

Experience the intersection of poetry and music with jazz aficionado and former National Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. The founder of the Favorite Poem Project and professor of creative writing at Boston University, Robert is known for his ability to bring poetry to life as spoken language, as showcased in his collection Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud. Robert will give a music-inflected reading, with back-up from jazz musicians Rakalam Bob Moses and Andrew Urbina.

If you don’t know the incredible work of Rakalam Bob Moses, this performance is worth watching:

Malachi Black is Literary Editor of The New York Quarterly and a James A. Michener Fellow at UT–Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. A 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellow, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, the Southwest Review, Best New Poets 2008, AGNI Online, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

What is your day job?

Black: As it happens, I’m fortunate enough right now to be without one: I’ve just entered my final year of a three-year fellowship at the University of Texas–Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. I also serve as literary editor of The New York Quarterly, but my involvement in the journal’s operations has been significantly hampered by geography.

How do you believe having your first book published will change your life?

Black: I hardly know, really. I certainly hope that it will enable me to teach at the university level—something to which I very earnestly aspire. Perhaps, too, it will provide some sense of satisfaction at having made a more substantial contribution (however ultimately meager) to the literary eons than the few pieces I’ve been lucky enough to scatter through the pages of a handful of magazines. But I doubt that it will meaningfully affect my writing life: the plane of publication bears little if at all on the compositional plane. Publishing a book won’t change the basic set of aesthetic problems that craze me every day, nor simplify the process of resolving them.

Who do you read?

Black: I’ve lately been rereading Gary Miranda’s little-known (and sadly out of print) translation of The Duino Elegies in conjunction with Barrow and Macy’s translations from The Book of Hours.

But for the last eighteen months or so, my major preoccupation has been the sonnet. I’m especially drawn to poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney, Greville, Drayton, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Vaughn. One of my favorite books of all time is an obscure anthology called Petrarch in England (ed. Jack D’Amico), which very carefully documents the adoption and adaptation of Petrarchan modes in the early modern period. Of course, my favorite—and I always feel rather precious in admitting this—is Shakespeare. I never travel without my crusty copy of the Sonnets.

In terms of more recent poets, I’ve recently laid steady eyes on Graham Foust’s Necessary Stranger; Ashbery’s Double Dream of Spring; Dean Young; and Dana Gioia’s excellent rendition of Montale’s Motteti. Also Hopkins’ “terrible sonnets”; John Clare; later Keats; Yeats; E. A. Robinson; Frost; Heaney; and Geoffrey Hill.

I’d better quit now, or risk spilling on indefinitely.

How did you come to write poetry?

Black: It sounds apocryphal, I know, but my mother, who’d yet to develop our collection of children’s books, read Milton and Chaucer to me almost as soon as I came home from the hospital. Really, that was my introduction to musical, magical language, and, preposterous as it might sound, I think that so early and steady an exposure to cultivated English cadence can only have been formative.

Almost as soon as I could write full sentences, I began keeping journals of mostly nonsense in which I would try to compose rhyming stories, and I would once in a while sit at my mother’s electric typewriter to try to write a “real” story. It wasn’t until I was twelve or thirteen, when I encountered Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, that I realized that what I was doing was writing poetry (or some crude approximation thereof). I was probably still too young to “get” Blake, but I was utterly transformed by my reading. Soon thereafter, I discovered Cummings, the Beats, the New York School—I was off and running like a hungry drunk. Many atrocious poems ensued.

How often do you write?

Black: I “touch” my work every day, usually for several hours. I’m rarely satisfied with just how far I can advance it, however. Groping occupies an enormous portion of my writing time; sometimes one simply isn’t ready to get it right.

What do you give up or sacrifice in order to write?

Black: Sad as it is to admit, I probably compromise many existing and prospective relationships. I’m a terrible correspondent, for example. It’s ultimately an issue of time: I need a lot of it, time to myself especially, in order to invite what I experience as “authentic” or “true” poetry. I live like a landing strip, sprawling widely through a kind of punctuated quietude. After all, writing is a solitary activity. Having an empty house helps, too.

What is the best advice you’ve received?

Black: “Figure out what you love and then figure out how to get paid for it.” That, as my wise father told me, is the key to happiness.

Do you feel there is a community of writers where you live? Do you participate in it?

Black: Well, the Michener Center provides a vital if inorganic community, and I’m very much a part of it. Austin is still developing a coherent literary culture, but talented writers abound.

Do you have specific career goals related to poetry?

Black: It’s hard for me think in terms of a “career” in poetry. I can only aspire to my ideals. Like Robert Frost, I hope that my work will appeal to a broad audience, rewarding the close readings of scholars and other specialists while contributing something to the lives of those with a more casual interest in poems and poetry. (I entertain a very Romantic notion of art’s role in and value to society.)

How has receiving the Ruth Lilly Fellowship changed your life?

Black: Perhaps most importantly, it affirmed the intuition that informs my aesthetic choices. Of course, it has also permitted me more time to focus on my work (by way of funding), and I am endlessly grateful to Christian Wiman and the kind people of the Poetry Foundation for their generous encouragement and support. But my life remains largely the same. Awards don’t write, after all.

What are your favorite places to learn about new poetry?

Black: Other people (readers and writers alike), journals, bookstores. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t developed any discrete systems. Often, the best recommendations come from writers whose work I admire, typically through published lectures, essays, interviews, and the like.

What’s the best poetry reading you’ve been to and why?

Black: That’s tough. I can say that the best reading I’ve recently attended was given by W. S. Merwin. Ed Hirsch has described Merwin’s work as “wisdom literature,” and on the evening I saw him read, at least, one had the undeniable sense that such was true. Merwin is also an impressively poised and mellifluous speaker.

Photo of W. S. Merwin by Kenan Writers’ Encounters on Flickr.

What does your role as the literary editor of The New York Quarterly entail?

Black: When I’m not half a continent away, I help sift through incoming manuscripts, solicit work, conduct interviews, and generally try my best to be useful.

What are your feelings on the state of poetry today?

Black: Well, a great deal is being written, and, insofar as sheer engagement with the art of poetry is concerned, I think our era is unprecedented. It’s true that most people reading poetry also write it, but I regard that less as evidence of poetry’s withering relevance than of increased access to higher education and a resultant sense of empowerment. Why not practice what we love? Even still, I doubt that the ratio of interesting to uninteresting work has changed much since the age of Ovid.

How do you believe the Internet will continue to shape poetry?

Black: I doubt my competence as a judge of such things, but I certainly expect the Internet to enable the formation and perpetuation of literary communities in increasingly sophisticated ways. I don’t know exactly how, but I also expect it to significantly contribute to our conception of poetry and poetic possibility. Flarf is surely just the beginning.

Poems by Malachi Black:
Drifting at Midday
Insomnia & So On

I live in the rectory

I detest intimacy.
I did not think, I only acted.
I married the pastor.
I dream about the feelings,
meditate on straw.

I don't imagine you've ever felt this way
(one of several ways)
(an ecstacy)
yet I can't tell the difference
between myself (momentarily)
and that one over there
and this is another syndrome

You can't remember how good it feels
What can you remember how good it feels?
I dare you to [  ]
(love, being in love, sex in love, transcendental massage)

I gave birth on my hands and knees
that is what I wanted to tell you

Remember you are the Goddess
in the room

’lookbackstage’ by Franklin Evans, as exhibited at the Sue Scott Gallery

Related:
Listen to Rebecca Wolff read ‘Breeder Sonnet’ from The King
Columns by Rebecca Wolff on Poems Out Loud

I remember the first poem of Dickinson’s that cracked language open for me. A late bloomer, I came to Dickinson when I was almost thirty, proceeding from the beginning of the Thomas Johnson edition—from the juvenilia—forward. I wanted to see the messier, younger, more developmental poems, then make my way to the later mind-blowing work. It was important to me to connect with what was human in the poet before approach what is divine.

Art by baskervillain on Flickr

It happened late one night. I was propped up in bed, head against wall, one lamp on, darkness all around, my windows open, crickets shuddering, the air heaving with their rhythms as if it breathed. I reached poem #130: These are the days when Birds come back. The first few lines recalled Shakespeare’s sonnet #73, which I had recently read. They also recalled another early favorite of mine, William Carlos Williams’ “These.” My fondness for both of these other poems likely contributed, at least initially, to #130’s appeal. I found myself gripped by its first imagistic stanza (remarkably modern for the 19th-century), and then moving into a second that both embraces and destabilizes cliché. What on earth were “sophistries of June” and how could skies “put on” those, “a blue and gold mistake”? I’d never seen such intrepid mingling of abstract and concrete, intellection and perception, poetic and colloquial (surely to speak of “skies” that “put on” sophistries shows a lexical flexing unusual for the time?). Dickinson gives us “fraud” in a sentence with “Bee,” “plausibility,” and “belief”; “seeds” with “witness” and “leaf,” ideas and objects interspersed so that they call attention to their mingling. If the poem is spiritual, it is not conventionally pious; it’s “in a Haze.”

But one of the words that jolted me—and I’d been steeped in poetry for almost a decade by then—can be found in stanza four. It was the word “altered.” Of course Dickinson meant “changed” air, but she meant “altared,” too, didn’t she? It hovers there because of the ceremonial nature of the poem. That alternate word is (to my mind) one of the “species” that “stands beyond…positive as Sound” (#501). A reader who had entered the world of the poem would recognize it. Dickinson must have been pleased when she lit upon the one word that would evoke both worlds—that of the physical season, and that of the sacred ritual—so definitively. It must have felt like a discovery for her too.

I have seen puns and homonyms before. They were funny and clever. They were hard to get away with (these days) without drawing undue attention. But this wasn’t funny or sarcastic or sexual, as the puns I knew tended to be. This was a pun not for tonal inflection, but for the opening of the world of the poem. The one word, with its implication of the other, allowed “altered” to be the crux for both. I got it. Something closed heaved open.

Certainly this must be something like what Gerard Manley Hopkins meant when he described poetry as language heightened and intensified (for the writer, for the reader). Certainly, too, if you’re not used to reading poetry, it may be something you miss, this careful, close, intimate paying of attention to words in terms of their lexical and tonal suggestiveness. You have to pay attention to a poem the way you might parse the e-mail of someone you’re in love with but not sure of: for clues, with a passionate attention. That may seem reductive, but it’s a little bit accurate to. Paying attention to a poem like that. —A poem which is, of course, a human voice. It still astonishes me that, out of the darkness, so to speak, a human being who is either far away or dead can speak to a reader with a living voice in this way.

The other poem that struck me early in my reading of Dickinson was #510. In this magnificent poem, the speaker describes an indescribable state as being like a time when “Grisly frosts—first Autumn morns / Repeal the Beating Ground.” I understood “repeal” meant to recall, to withdraw, but it also (among other things) suggested “re-peel.” Painful and accurate. In so many ways, the words Dickinson picks for a poem involve the abstract and the concrete: the intellectual and the physical. Her metaphorical terms often physicalize concepts: she can “wade grief…whole pools of it” (#252); she wants to “moor tonight…in thee” (#249); she defines “mirth” as “the mail of anguish” (#165), “hope” as a “thing…that perches in the soul.” In poem #510, to say that something is “repealed” is to make an intellectual judgment about it. To say that it has been “re-peeled” is immediate, physical, and brutal to imagine—especially when the ground is (as she describes it in the poem) “beating”—as if it is, or wants to stay, alive. The frost re-peels that warmer, more optimistic season, which has come to an end but still lingers. Correcting it. Flaying it. Again.

We know, from the fascicles (the actual written copies of Dickinson’s poems), that there were often several choices of words—a little constellation of them—written around the presumed selection. To look at these other facets is fascinating; Dickinson seemed to like words that allowed her to suspend meaning slightly, to retain not simply ambiguity, but a spectrum of connotation and denotation. She would not be “shut up” in “prose” (#613). We are lucky that, in having these fascicles, we can get a glimpse of her brain going around. If you look at them you can be overwhelmed by the dizzing outreaching of her mind, as if one word (or line) of a poem were sending out shoots in many different directions. Which to choose? Why should she have to (“because they liked me “still”“? #613).

Once you are deep into Dickinson, it is (to borrow from her) like having the top of your head lifted off: a cosmos pours in, messy and starry. Fixed relations in the mind are surrounded and stirred. The lid is taken off language; the lid is taken off the mind. Words shake off their determining chains, flex their possibilities. Some may say this is silly: I’m being too dramatic here. But if you have not experienced this unlidding after having been closed up, you can’t know what it’s like, being spoken to for the first time—or is it that for the first time you’re truly listening? Both. If “The Brain—is wider than the Sky” (#632), the poem is wider than its words. Like a horizon that may admit many dawns, a poem by Emily Dickinson often transcends the physical limits of language printed on a page.

Related: In April 2009, Robert Pinsky read three poems by Emily Dickinson for Poems Out Loud: #249, #883, and #303. Listen to him read them here.

Marilyn Chin will be reading from Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen publicly in November. Here are the dates:

11/8 - Newtonville, MA - Newtonville Books
11/9 - Cambridge, MA - Blacksmith House
11/19 - Seattle, WA - Elliott Bay Book Company

1. I knew a poem existed inside and outside of me multiple moments in my pre-poet life. Like Marilyn Chin’s “X-Acto knife” muse in Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, there it was: “beauty and terror.” It happened at about age nine when I couldn’t help crying for hours having suddenly realized my separateness from my mother, even though she sat there, stroking the hair up off my forehead.

And once when I hadn’t felt the passion of a man for eight years. And I suddenly experienced it, mind and body—both, feasting and exploding, cataloging details, memories, dreams—like tiny bulbs on a string, rapid-fire pops of shattered glass: laments, fears, longings zapped. But also the return of emotional complexity and simplicity stalking each other. Beethoven and candlelight sparking ecstasy, flowing parallel and merging into the physical surprise of my body’s proficiency, juxtaposed with the steeping interludes during which my story swirled out around the quiet basin of his bed and he lay listening. How he gasped in surprise, declaring, “That’s an amazing story!”—objectively removed from my pain and able to enjoy the narrative of woman deceived by hope and trust: thus, the empty body of my Self, the vessel ready, willing to receive.

The poem began in that emptiness, and rounded out in the vessels filling with both the perfection of the physical, the wonder of the promise, and then the boggling paradox of mind when this entity-man began to share his love for both Beethoven and Rush Limbaugh—the incongruity unimaginable to me. The simple antithetic reality that nothing is simple. That Marilyn Chin must write a poem about her granduncle kidnapping her mother in order to sell her. That her grandmother chased him down, rescued the little girl. That Grandmother’s feet were bound when she did this. And that in the same breath the poem, “Cauldron,” hurls the paradox: “Her cry would startle the ages. / Meanwhile, the chrysanthemum blooms.” That we all possess a love-hate relationship with Truth. That the poem began and won’t end.

Poems lie in the crux of our paradox-filled lives, form a fulcrum point. “Poetry is tribal, not material,” says C. D. Wright, “…poets are the ones who see that the word does not break faith with the line of the body.” Whether beautiful or terrible, the poem calls me out when I read it, when I write it: “When you clean the head, don’t forget the eyes,” writes Marilyn Chin. Words that do not break faith with the line of our bodies are behind-the-eye words—following our whole length, deep below the surface. But we do need our skin, that invaluable container.

2. The NordicTrack clacks, skis falling loosely in the mechanism’s tracks. I butterfly clip open Rhapsody in Plain Yellow and grab it when breathing reaches stasis. I read aloud Marilyn Chin’s poem, “Where We Live Now (Vol. 3, #4) eternal noonscape: “I don’t love you for your savage beauty,” fits into one exhale. Line one. “…not for your pale fragrant flesh,” facilitates exhale: line two. “…not for your sun-spectred countenance,”—line three—”…and your stars that paralyze the sky”: I’m flowing with the love and sense of impending bile. I enter the sanctuary of creation astride the poem. My heavy breath fits into Chin’s lines and I recreate it, just as it recreates me. It scrapes into the soft tissue of my imagination, dislodging loosened pieces, giving space, and breath—mine? Or hers? In the echoing antechamber, then, I see some elbow, heel, hip—some skeletal part of her soul—when in “To Pursue the Limitless” her poem pursues an infinitive “You”:

You were faithful to the original
You were married to the Chinese paradox
Beautiful words are not truthful
The truth is not beautiful

and then the paradox interpreted:

You have translated "bitter" as "melon"
"Fruit" as "willful absence"

There are body parts of consciousness flying through the air. I can’t help myself. I suck them in. They barrage my lungs, scour my eyes. Loveliness is discarded for truth: concise, un-Romantic, paradoxical Truth (boldly refuting Keats’ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”!) Beauty exists. Truth exists. And they sometimes have nothing to do with each other. “Savage beauty” has failed us all, and the dazzling, be-tingling “sun-spectred countenance” that births obsession, too, withering when the truth about the obsessee comes out to play its ironic conundrum.

3. I curl up in a hammock and stare at the garden through the screen. I hope for a hummingbird. I get a helicopter passing overhead, low. Chin’s “eternal noonscape” pulled me in and took me down. It rains and I watch the phlox wands driven to the ground, blooming. It’s been a cold, dry summer. I, too, long, for a lover’s “limp arm draped over my pillow”—and I could bid him come, establish the arm again. But then I couldn’t paint bamboo and leave my body gladly, ideas planted in my head by Chin’s noonscape. The lover, the arm, the helicopter, the hummingbird are outer. Today I re-establish myself as poet, let the malaise exile me from any response-ability. I had let myself be responsive, I thought; then a boyfriend described my best attributes (when pressed) as “caring, very loving; oh, and very sexy.” A nerve-bed of malaise could sprout in that dung—poems stalking each other like herbivoric Venus flytraps. He also declared my poems lacked myth. Meanwhile, I’m crazy-weeding my garden of all the myth-weeds—the firm-held myths, holding firm—unable to plant when I’m busy trying to weed all this outer stuff from the manure-rich soil, trying to act responsibly!

Marilyn’s poem is a wind, like a mariah or a zephyr, bringing the rain. Blow, Marilyn: blow malaise, exile—here in the house where I was born, I grapple with the tricky problem: all appears intact, even when peeled back, membrane glistening. The trickiness is the assumption that all must be well—I was born here, for god’s sake. There is no explanation for a sense of exile from the body—thus, madness. Preprogramming says, either buck up and declare yourself the problem—(snot nosed, tousle-haired,” writes Marilyn) (sexy and altogether too magnanimous, says another.) My roommate wants to try eggplant recipes. My client wants me to get her a baby now. The ex wants Loki, not trees. And I, curled up with Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, listening to the wind blow residual rain from the birch onto the astilbe and bee balm flowers. There is an invasive tree getting bigger by the day, stealing the white birch’s sun, soil, water. I need to do something about it. Get up. Find a saw. But now, thanks to Marilyn, I am a poet again: nothing, and everything, some strange exiled conduit. When I’m not looking I sense a quieting joy in this. So, instead, I google “Gibbs Farm Museum”—and learn about the Dakotah who walked the same trails I run. But they were headed to the wild rice ponds up north. I run in circles.

4. Chin’s platform:

The poet guards the conscience of society—no, you're wrong.
She stands lonely on that hillock observing the pastures.
The world scoffs back with bog and terror.

Though the world may scoff, Marilyn Chin’s poems stubbornly resist being cut off from their dark, inner blare. I want to stop. But I cannot move my eyes from the lines: “How is my mail-order darling? / Waiting for her man’s hard cock / He enters her from behind / her sobbing does not deter him / …Who is both Master and intruder? / Whose bloody handprint on the wall?” I know the wall, the taste of the floor, the spit wiped from my eyes, the hands throwing me to the tile—the slandering knife of a man’s words nurturing self-loathing, loathing of life. I took on the husband-words; they tattooed my body, in and out; lonely on my hillock I remember the accusation, “flip-flopping fish;” all the “c-words” cutting me. And I will never forget them, nor will my poem.

My poem/Chin’s poem create the sanctuary: “In art we enter into the sanctuary itself,” writes Wallace Stevens, “The true poem is not the work of the individual artist; it is the universe itself, the one work of art which is forever perfecting itself.” The plain-spoken shouts of these poems which call out violence against women—against any “other”—in both East and West, pull the secrets to our tongues. The poem begins to perfect itself within the reader. Too much information you mutter with bog and terror. Cut open the secrets and heal, we shout back: “She who survives to tell the tale shall hold the power,” writes Marilyn Chin.

The Poet’s dirty laundry becomes of the tribe, a fulcrum for healing.

5. Chin’s “yellow fists” fight: “If you cut my yellow wrists, I’ll teach my yellow toes to write” This is her version of seeing that “the word does not break faith.” There is no turning to the bright side, no sweet “melon” evolving from “bitter.” No ignoring her “yellow”-ness. Her poems just say it: “Me and silence / and some strange race WRECKED!” She, poised as the collision-piece between parents and new homeland, embodying transition: “A heathen poidog, a creamy half-and-half?” Daughter of Hong Kong and of the US. She grew up watching the outer-identities of her mother and her father—their quiet collapse under the weight and thrall of change from East to West—their “assimilation.” Chin is the witness—the truth teller. She must watch, it seems; take mental notes. She cannot help the spilling.

6. Gaston Bachelard writes, “we feel calmer and more confident when in the old home, in the house we were born in, than we do in the houses on streets where we have only lived as transients.” If this is true, does calmness equal numbness? A connection to status quo, lulled, lulled, lulled into a night-dream world, not one of daydreams—and in those night-dreams do all the ghosts of the house rise up out of the old lampshades and joists?

My house has been my one stable rock from which I’ve launched divorce and single parenthood. Lately I’ve been longing to shake that strong-footing so I can feel the sense of my Self as strong—Marilyn Chin-strong—exiled, forced to find my sea legs in a world alien to Self. I dreamed a tornado devoured my house, took everything but the two-by-fours framing air. In the dream I cried out in delight at the prospect of re-invention of everything but my shelter’s skeleton. Now I wish to walk away and leave it to my memory and imagination. My creative mind wants a nest with no familiar ghosts.

My space in the house I was born in, the antithesis of Marilyn Chin’s. Her house is transient, along with her name, her identity, her landscape. But her ghosts follow her. This is not heartening.

7. My mother is lying in a hospital bed in a coma.  I’m twenty-five.  I’m holding my one-year-old daughter.  I’m stroking the hair up off my mother’s forehead.  For a week I hear her thoughts.  I know she’s okay.  We’re not separate.  Then I watch her stop breathing.  I am holding on tight to my daughter with my left hand and my mother’s cold hand with my right.  I nearly break my brain trying to reconcile the two.

Twenty-five years later I still sleep in my mother’s bedroom.  I position the bed all willy-nilly, differently angled than ever my mother placed it, different than ever I placed it when married to either of my two husbands.  I’m practicing—my raft is floating on a green lake.  I think it’s soon time to try a stream or maybe an ocean. 

There was a moment in this bed when I lay crying, husband turned away from me, divorce on my mind, wanting my mother, when I realized I could be my own mother, do it pretty well, like I mother my children.  The mother-skin, a good fit.

8. “Marilyn”—NOT “Mei Ling,” her given name.  Her father renamed her for a famous blonde when at age five he transplanted her into Southern California from Hong Kong.  Though she taped her eyes open in poems, they never became round.  In “Song of the Giant Calabash,” she smashes her father’s head like a calabash (with a poem).  No one will mind once they hear the tale, the daughter’s “useless” hands and mind, shredded by a father’s tongue and might. 

So, when Chin asks, “Are you a rose—or a tattoo of fire?” (in “Identity Poem (#99)”!) I see her mother, Rose, tattooed upon a daughter, Marilyn, identity blazing both painfully and beautifully upon her skin.  “She married him for a green card / He abandoned her for a blonde.”  The flaming flower is blonde Marilyn, is exiled Mother Rose, is the inverse of the inner process: the beauty of nothing, clearly a Buddhist-bent sort of relief.

9. Birth has its inherent problems. We are freed into the tribe, unto ourselves, and into an ever-insidious longing for mother, (for an all-surrounding reassurance.) At her death, our worst fear is consummated and we pass through into the poetry of an orphan: “I sit at her grave for hours / A slow drizzle purifies my flesh / I still yearn for her womb / And can’t detach / …What is the void but motherlessness? / The song bellies up,” writes Chin. In her poem, “Transcendental Etude,” Adrienne Rich cuts it to the quick: “But in fact we were always like this, / rootless, dismembered: knowing it makes the difference.” Knowing it makes the difference. Rootless and dismembered. Born! Where does this “knowing” get us? How does this awareness free me from this sense of longing?

In the very first line of her book, Chin gives me an image to work with (to perfect): “The canary died in the gold mine, her dreams got lost in a sieve.”  Grief-filled, but there is the sieve image, the sieve that catches dreams, and canaries, inner and outer things.  “Poetry is a vast orphanage in which you and I are stars,” writes Chin.  Can I—we—sift out identity to reconcile the tension between this unavoidable longing to be one with an “other”— and the ecstasy of liberation from the smothering, from the indistinct blurring, from the inner boundarilessness between self and parent?  I want to choose my tattoos, put them in their place, call out the invasive inner messages, exorcise them to “outer” and tear off the plastic roses that needle, constrict, pretend, and alienate my peace.  Then, I want to dwell, at will, in the presence of the other entity—Self—the inner entity.  The star. 

Perhaps poetry and its orphanage of stars might be what Alan Williamson is talking about when he describes an eruption of inner life—and how this explosion of being takes us out of the shared social world, transporting us into those self-defining moments in life when awareness of the tension between self and other—“solitude and dependency”—shutters through body and soul and we are both terrified and fascinated.  Do I want to be alone or with someone?  Which is it?  Irreconcilable, perhaps the poem reconciles, accepts the Truth; perhaps we awaken from the blurry womb-dream and accept our abandonment—detach—laugh at ourselves, accept a partner if we’re lucky to find one. 

This process is what I experience through Marilyn Chin’s clamoring “Rhapsody.”  By the end she has moved from graveside and dares end the book with this: “Leave us nothing,” a paradoxical awakening beyond identity, beyond mother, beyond the harping of modern culture.  She is freed of the pain of her history and that of her mother and father—those outer identity elements named, said: lunatic, orphan, old world, and even lover, and poet. 

She takes us through her poetic sifting, first finding blues smeared on yellow, then, a clearer “plain yellow,” her identity a distinct outer entity.  Stated.  Said.  Diminished to bare nothing:

…it ain't all randy dandy
in the new kingdom.
Say     rebuke     descry
Hills and canyons, robbed by sun, leave us nothing.
                                                   —Marilyn Chin

Even in the orphanage, we thrive. Birth ain’t so bad if we can manage to live. The sieve to “nothing” gives me hope.

10. Come, Marilyn. You show me my skin. My tattoos. I skim my body parts. I run to know my feet are sure. For comfort, for strength, I exult in the sky meeting empty field—touch my mind to “nothing.” I let in the knowledge that just beyond the hillock stands a Dakotah tipi, neatly fenced within museum’s yard. Observed. Othered. Exiled—within its own stone’s throw of home. My father bought this bare land and built on it. I forage and plant and borrow against it. I spit on it, claim its ownership of my soul, curse its hold on me, jump on the back of this poet who espouses to no home—to homelessness of spirit and an evolution into the “nothing” of this lack, a found-comfort in this Truth, versus comfort in a lie: that I own what my father staked and fenced.

So I follow your suggestion, Ms. Chin, I let the fists come out fighting. The toes, the feet, the fingers, the yellow fists, red fists, black fists, brown and white. The Limbaugh fists. To see the fists dance, to say the truth, hear it said; to rebuke the liar, and descry the lie blasts to smithereens the comfortable cartoons, well-nurtured by the caricatures playing across the screen of my culture.  Blast and break, splinter—breathe and see.  With inner and outer clarified, there is no way around the truth of how I came to be here, and the stories of the ghosts who wander here.

11. There’s the off chance it never would have happened, you wouldn’t have become.  For opium you could have washed away down the slavery river, mother sold, mother ravished.  I, too, could have ended pre-birth, death at the rifle point, my great-great-grandmother lost in the Dakotah’s last battles to keep the land.  Same as the prairie people, grandmothers mowed down at Wounded Knee, New Ulm, Scandia Grove (where Olof successfully hid in tall grasses and grew to piece together my lineage.)  What are the broken lines?  Who are we missing?  Who is exiled on her ancestral soil?  Here I am, a curved line in a hammock holding a pen: maybe this sticky longing is for mountains and fjords.  I try my damnedest to steward “my land,” write poems including those whose path crossed it just 150 years ago.

12. I nearly broke my brain trying to reconcile my discoveries in the Limbaugh-lover’s bed.  The romance/the three-quarter ton pick-up full of Limbaugh-logs.  The ink on my thigh where he first wrote his name/the passion with which he spoke his scarlet adulations to Limbaugh-hood.  I left him for my hammock.  For poems written by candlelight, alone on my porch.

13. Ultimately, poetry threatens my “American” way of life.  To face my own truth is to face my whiteness: “The white egret on a dunghill stands”—the whole truth of my “arrogance, ignorance, indifference” (from Chin)—greed for the material, self-exile from the tribal (thus—spiritual poverty.)  I turn away from the suffering of the majority of the world’s people.  I ignore the scrum left sloshing in the wake of my consumption’s violence, ignore the wilting of Earth itself; dismembered, I ignore—forget—the tribe, and poetry’s call to the tribe.  I need to clean my eyes, to hear Chin descry “Some American poet” who “said to me, ‘The Haiku is dead / I thought, pink and swollen, something sad about his body.’”  I am pink, swollen and sad.  So I let the poems belly up, work their sifting sieve.

14. The sanctuary is not an isolated place—it is the universe.  The poet has a voice that plants poems like seeds inside of us to sprout and pop and become our own knowing.  If the poet is Marilyn Chin, a new immigrant, she has the agency to represent all of us, to remind us of the significance we place on our outer shell—our appearance, our role, our racial heritage, our class.  Her poems become our own and we see our skin.  Back “home” it wasn’t so randy dandy, and neither is it here—it’s complex and hard wherever you roam.  But if there is injury dealt in the wandering, we have to make right the evil, else our own inner soft places carry the injury, the blood/the death/the rot/the inner knives lodged in those we wronged and within ourselves: preventing movement, stardom.

We’re all the same—that’s the point.

I am the great-great-granddaughter of immigrants who took the land of the Dakotah and Ojibway; I am the great-granddaughter of a poor orphan, of subsistence farmers who spoke no English, who changed their names to fit in.  A little boy hid in prairie grass and avoided death—the life of a child was rescued, and thus I exist.

15. Teetering on the fulcrum of awareness, we are the poem.  All who are non-Native, break our heads against an inherent condition:  exiled immigrants sharing the precious land we robbed and spoiled.  With knowledge of the precious inner, the flagrant outer, we just might be able to save our souls, begin the creative process of reconciliation for the ignored sins of immigrant forefathers and mothers:  Chin catches the images in her poetry sieve (I mix two of her poems):  “Black swollen fruit dangling on a limb.”  [“They gave you the paterland, but you were too lazy to farm it”.]  “Red forgotten flesh sprayed across the prairie.”  [“Your condo is leaking, but you’re too angry to repair it”.]  “Parched brown vines creeping over the wall.”  [“Love grows in the garden, but you’re too impudent to tend it”.]  “Yellow winged pollen, invisible enemies.” [“The Goddess wags her finger at your beautiful wasteland”.]

The native people here were hunters and gatherers, not owners of land.  My poor great-great-grandparents dreamed of tillable land, came and took advantage of the landless.  In the line of my body, buried deep, is a hut at the foot of a glacier at the end of a Norwegian fjord, the land too poor to produce much.

16. Tonight I transplant echinacea—purple cone flower.  I dig it out of my poetry garden and place it in a more arid garden—poor soil, hot sun, street-side and salty.  I’ll call it the Sanctuary of Truths, watch the healing flower struggle and thrive, bear its myriad blossoms with their astounding centers that give birth to even more star-like babies.  I’ll dedicate this place to Marilyn Chin, bless it with her strength in truth-telling.  I’ll move a black-eyed Susan here, too, for my mother, let it be the Aria to mothers Chin began.  I’ll let the poem perfect itself here.  Put her tin can, too, provoke bog and terror when my neighbors walk by.  My daughter, now grown, will tell me to weed it; and I will hear the freeway’s “requiem” when I do.  “In the motherless desert heat / I am missing you.  Welcome sweet sojourner.”

17. To live with my Self as well as with the tribe, I live and breathe poems, both my own and those of others, choke on their phlegm and bitter translation, run from their truth in terror, but ultimately, disembark from the ski machine, jubilant in the sanctuary of Truths.  I see my body, strong.  I sense the inner quiet of my Self, distinct, untouchable.  Identity glistens on my skin.  I ponder exile, picking up Chin’s “Rhapsody.”  Caught in a “twofold” consciousness, Chin summons souls—only to find nothing—a connection to Self that is paradoxically contingent upon connection to “other”-ness—an infinitive “You.”  As poet and dreamer she sings and I follow—sojourn into the sprawl of the global tribe, vigilantly sifting with the sieve of poetry, ever perfecting the universe—the sanctuary—it creates.

Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston.  The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon, 1994. 

Chin, Marilyn.  Rhapsody in Plain Yellow.  New York: Norton, 2002.

Rich, Adrienne.  “Transcendental Etude.” The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi.  New York: Norton. 86-90.

Stevens, Wallace.  The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination.  New York: Vintage, 1951.

Williamson, Alan.  “Falling off the World: Poetry and Innerness.”  Poets Teaching Poets.  University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Wright, C.D. “69 Hidebound Opinions, Propositions, and Several Asides from a Manila Folder Concerning the Stuff of Poetry.”  By Herself.  Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2004.

Jean Miriam Larson‘s poems, interviews and essays have appeared in Midway Journal, rock paper scissors, the Park Bugle, and in performances with TalkingImageConnection and Three Dances.  Her poem, Night Suite, received honorable mention from judge, Stanley Plumly, in the 2003 Ann Stanford Poetry Prize.  Jean served on the editorial board of Water-Stone Review 2007 and has an MFA in Writing from Hamline University, Saint Paul, Minnesota.